class nation and identity-the anthropology of political movements

CLASS, NATION AND IDENTITY

The Anthropology of Political Movements

JEFF PRATT

Pluto P PressLONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

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First published 2003by PLUTO PRESS

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Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–7453–1672–7 (hc) –– ISBN 0–7453–1671–9 (pb)

1. Nationalism. 2. Social classes––Political aspects. 3. Nationalism––Europe––Case studies. 4. Europe––Social conditions. I. Title. II. Series.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi

1 Introduction 1

2 Northern Italy: ‘A World to Win’ 26

3 Andalusia: Everyone Or No One 46

4 Tuscany: Peasants Into Comrades 66

5 A Short History of the Future 87

6 The Basque Country: Making Patriots 101

7 Yugoslavia: Making War 131

8 Occitania and Lombardy: Populism Red and White 160

9 Conclusion 181

References 202Index 210

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first stimulus for this book came out of the experience of research inCentral Italy in the early 1970s. This was an environment structured bythe pervasive conflict between Catholic and communist politicalmovements, and it was here that I discovered that as a fieldworker myown political identity was more important than my nationality in mostsocial contexts. It was also here that I encountered the contrast betweenrural and urban social worlds, and began to hear the many ways thatthese are represented. This contrast has profound importance inEuropean political history and constitutes a recurring theme in this study.

A second and in some ways more enduring stimulus for this bookcomes from teaching, from the wish to make information about politicalmovements and their interpretation more accessible. The book is theresult of long collaboration and challenge from colleagues and studentsat Sussex University on courses in political anthropology and contem-porary European studies. The arguments have been modified andreformulated in the face of their alternative perspectives and constantscepticism. I would particularly like to acknowledge my indebtedness toZdenek Kavan, with whom I have taught a Masters course onnationalism, ethnicity and citizenship for many years. I have learnedmuch from him about European history and political theory, and wehave both had to clarify our arguments in the face of our students’steadfast refusal to be convinced. Work on Yugoslavia is notoriously riskyfor the non-specialist, and I would not have embarked on the case studywhich became chapter 7 without the presence at the Sussex EuropeanInstitute in the mid-1990s of a very substantial group of scholars,including Cornelia Sorabji, Ivan Vejvoda and Mary Kaldor.

The book was researched and written during sabbatical leave grantedby the Sussex anthropology department, and the text was edited withpainstaking care by Jenny Money. Tom Wilson, Peter Luetschford andJon Mitchell gave me detailed comments on the manuscript, and thelatter as series editor for Pluto gave me much support in the stages ofpreparation. To all of them my profound thanks.

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All books have some loose ends: ideas not worked through, sourcesand suggestions not followed up. Personal circumstances mean thatthere is more of this unfinished business than I would have liked, but itwas time to stop. It is dedicated to the memory of Assuntina Angeli,compagna della vita.

Acknowledgements vii

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1 INTRODUCTION

In 1873 the socialist workers of Breslavia (Wroclaw), which was thenin Germany, ten years after the death of the pioneer workers’ leaderLassalle, dedicated a new red flag. On the front it bore … aninscription to … Lassalle, surmounted by the motto Liberty, Equality,Fraternity … During Bismarck’s antisocialist law the flag wassmuggled into Switzerland. Under Hitler, between 1933 and 1945,it was carefully kept, first buried in an allotment garden, later in thecellar of a plumber, who refused to give it up to the Red Army officerswho came to salute it in 1945. When Breslavia became Polish andwas renamed Wroclaw, the keeper of the flag transported it to WestGermany to hand it over to the Social-Democratic Party, which,presumably, still has it …

(Hobsbawm: 1984b: 67)

The increasing prominence of ethnic and national movements at a globallevel over the last 20 years has led to a phenomenal growth in research,and the resulting studies have generated a sense of intellectualexcitement and challenge which has permeated a range of intellectualdisciplines, from literary studies to international relations. Two books,both published in 1983, have achieved canonical status. Gellner’sNations and Nationalism opened up the relationship between nationalistmovements and modernity, the question of historical continuity in groupidentity, and the relative salience of different cultural elements in groupdefinition. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities directed attentionto the importance of experience, memory and imagination, the emotionalpower of these movements and their actual or potential recourse toviolence. This is a rich research agenda, but also significantly differentfrom the one that has dominated research on other kinds of politics. Whyshould this be? And where are the distinctive features of ethnic ornational politics located?

The inevitable comparison here is with the analysis of class politics. Inthe first part of the twentieth century it had been class rather than

1

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ethnicity which had acted as the purported motor of European politicalhistory, and had been the dominant subject of intellectual inquiry. Thecelebrated death of class as a ‘master narrative’ has often in practicemeant the death of class as any kind of narrative, and this makes it harderto get the issues back into perspective. There is growing amnesia aboutboth the range of class movements and their political scope; they areremembered chiefly as struggles around economic interests, generatedin the workplace, in a now largely superseded system of industrialproduction. Their death, for some analysts (Escobar 1992; Touraine1985), allowed for the birth of ‘new social movements’, the release ofenergies into more complex and differentiated forms of political struggle,particularly around questions of identity.

Yet, as the best studies have shown, class politics was always morecomplex than that. Even the short quotation from Hobsbawm above is areminder of the bitter divisions within class politics, the jealous guardingof symbols, and political allegiances which were more enduring thannational boundaries. The kinds of explanation and interpretation whichemerged as paradigmatic in the study of ethnicity and nationalism canbe, and have been, deployed in the study of class. In this terrain we arealso faced with all the dimensions of modernity, with the dislocation andconcentration of economic and cultural capitals, with the massmovements of people and rapid cultural evolution. Here too we findcomplex historical narratives which shape class identity and futureaspirations, we find ‘imagined communities’ and the transmission ofmemories. Here too we encounter the same interpretative issues abouthow identity is ‘constructed’, and how specific experiences become classexperiences. Above all, we also find passion. It is astonishing that thepoint has to be made, but such is the mesmeric hold of the canonical textsthat it is worth repeating: passion is not an ingredient unique to thepolitics of nationalism.

The first purpose of this book is to re-examine the ways in which classand ethnic or nationalist politics have been analysed, and to open upissues which are of general importance in political anthropology. Insuggesting that the wide-ranging research agenda which has illuminatedour understanding of nationalism can also be applied to classmovements, and vice versa, I am not suggesting that these movementsare indistinguishable. The problem lies elsewhere, in the use of differentparadigms for the study of political process. These have made the twokinds of politics incommensurable, in terms of the type of person whoacts, and the kind of world they inhabit. Put simply, in one world we findeconomic categories of people driven by material interests, in the othercultural subjects consumed by passions.

2 Class, Nation and Identity

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This introductory chapter will start by exploring some of thetheoretical texts which have contributed to this view of a qualitativedifference between the politics of nationalism and all other struggles. Outof it will emerge a more open and less reified view of what ‘economics’or ‘culture’ is about, and suggestions about how we can develop acommon approach to political movements. The next sections examinesome of the key issues in the analysis of nationalist and class politics, andexplore the implications of adopting a more unified approach, one whichkeeps the richness of insight which can be found in both fields of study.Demonstrating the value of this approach cannot be done throughcomparative surveys or generalising overviews: it requires a depth ofethnographic and historical information which reveals the interactionof multiple processes. For that reason I decided to build up the argumentthrough case studies, all taken from the southern parts of Europe, andall dealing with large-scale political action which made a sustainedimpact on society and the state. The first group of case studies deals withclass-based mobilisation, the second with nationalism, followed byshorter examples of movements which combine elements of both. Thecases are grouped together, but each chapter covers similar ground,examining the broad historical context within which these movementsemerged, the construction of collective identities, and their characteris-tic forms of organisation and political action. In intermediate sectionsand in the conclusion I will draw out the comparative dimensions andexplore their relevance for theoretical work in this field.

TWO CLASSIC TEXTS AND THEIR JOKES

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) opens up stimulatingquestions about the changing representations of time in political action,and on the role of history, memory and the imagination in the formationof identity. The focus is also on political passion: in numerous reviews ofthe book (starting with Kitching 1985), Anderson’s superiority to Gellneris seen in his ability to explain the passion of nationalism, and it is linkedto the claim that nationalism plays much the same part in the life ofpeople as old-time religion. All this is important and extremely valuable,and it is illustrated by a much-quoted and rather bizarre joke. Incommenting on the religion-like qualities of nationalism, he remarks thatmost states instituted a tomb of the unknown warrior, but tombs of fallenliberals or unknown Marxists are rather rare. Anderson knew very wellthat at the time he was writing, the world was full of much-veneratedtombs and statues to known Marxists, even if many have since beenexhumed or their statues melted down. You cannot have unknown

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Marxists, if by that is intended writers, but you can and did have manycommemorations of anonymous workers, who had been martyrs orheroes in the cause of the revolution. There was also a whole Cold-Warindustry, much of it located in Princeton and Harvard (Shore 1990: 59),saying that communism was just like old-time religion, full of fanaticsand prophets, whose faith was immune to argument and who exploitedthe irrational masses.

Does the joke matter? I think it does. It is part of a series of rhetoricalmoves which digs a ditch around the study of nationalism, and ends uplocking the study of class and ethnic politics into incommensurableparadigms. Both class and ethnicity are shorthand terms for a variety ofpolitical movements; obviously there are distinctions to be made, butthey will not emerge if we make the assumption that ethnic politics is inany sense unique because it has a cultural dimension, or because itinvolves identity construction, or because it generates political passion orviolence. If we do not break with this paradigm, we underwrite theinevitability of ethnic politics.

Ernest Gellner’s book Nations and Nationalism (1983) also has a famousjoke, the claim that Marxists, because they were unable to explain thefailure of revolutions and the power of national solidarity, had a ‘wrongaddress theory’ of nationalism: ‘The awakening message was intendedfor classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.’This is one of four false theories of nationalism which are given shortshrift at the end of his study – ‘not one of these theories is remotelytenable’ (Gellner 1983: 130). Again, it is not clear whether this joke wasproduced in good faith, and its popularity is strange, since it acts as asmokescreen for the argument.

The brevity of the reference should not mislead us, since much of thebook is concerned with debunking Marxist theories of conflict and thepolarisation of class relations. ‘Capital, like capitalism,’ says Gellner(1983: 97) ‘seems an overrated category’. Instead he writes aboutindustrial society, where he claims, ‘Stratification and inequality do exist,and sometimes in extreme form; nevertheless they have a muted anddiscrete quality, attenuated by a kind of gradualness of the distinctionsof wealth and standing’ (1983: 25). I will come back to the extreme formsof inequality and dichotomous views of class, after looking at whatGellner identifies as the real locus of conflict in industrial society.

Nationalism first emerges in the transition to industrialism, a period ofturbulent readjustment when political and cultural boundaries becomemore congruent. Nationalism is the process whereby a culture isendowed with a political roof. Two issues arise: first, what is a culture?;and secondly, under what circumstances is the transition turbulent or


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violent? Gellner admits that culture is an elusive concept, but that ingeneral he is using it in an anthropological sense, to distinguish it fromKultur, or high culture. This does not clarify a great deal, becauseGellner’s usage is not just variable, but actually builds a key part of theargument on a slippage between two kinds of referent. The dominantmeaning is associated with language, and he discusses the enormous gapbetween the number of languages in the world and the number of actualor potential nationalisms. This is illustrated through a celebrated andwitty account of the alienation of a cultural minority, the Ruritanianmigrants, who find themselves in Megalomania. In a later article hereturns to the same theme. ‘The modern world has produced societies inwhich the division of labour is very advanced, the occupational structureis highly unstable and most work is semantic and communicative ratherthan physical’ (Gellner 1997: 85). In that world

individuals find themselves in very stressful situations unless the nationalistrequirement of congruence between a man’s culture and that of his environmentis satisfied. Without such a congruence, life is hell. Hence the deep passion which,according to Perry Anderson, is absent from my theory. (Gellner 1997: 84)

In these phrases about semantics and communication, the ground hasbeen prepared for a different use of the term culture, one which appearsfurther on in the 1983 monograph. On the issue of whether industrial-ism will continue to generate conflict, Gellner says,

We have yet to discuss the difficult and important question whether advancedindustrialism, as such, in any case constitutes a shared culture, overruling the –by now irrelevant – differences of linguistic idiom. When men [sic] have the sameconcepts, more or less, perhaps it no longer matters whether they use differentwords to express them. (Gellner 1983: 95)

At this point culture is no longer a characteristic of people who share alanguage or ethnicity, it is a broader category used to describe thecognitive features of industrial society. This is an odd shift, not leastbecause it comes just one page after ridiculing the Marxist idea that theproletariat had no fatherland, or that they might share a culture (Gellner1983: 94). If an industrial culture expressed in different linguistic idiomsis plausible, why not a proletarian culture? I am in favour of this broaderusage, but we need to be aware of the shift from his dominant usage interms of language or ethnicity. When Gellner analyses the circumstancesunder which the transition to industrialism is conflictual, he appears toconflate the cultural differences represented by ethnicity with the broadercultural transformations associated with modernity.

In the chapter on a typology of nationalisms he suggests that conflictoccurs most readily in the early stages of industrialisation, and where

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class and ethnic cleavages coincide. This argument emerges in a numberof passages:

The evidence seems to indicate that the classes engendered by early industrial-ism … do not take off into permanent and ever-escalating conflict, unless culturaldifferentiation provides the spark. (Gellner 1983: 93, 95)

It was the social chasms created by early industrialism, and by the unevennessof its diffusion, which made [nationalist conflict] acute ... Whenever culturaldifferences served to mark off these chasms, then there was trouble indeed. Whenthey did not, nothing much happened ... Classes, however oppressed andexploited, did not overturn the political system when they could not definethemselves ‘ethnically’. Only when a nation became a class, a visible andunequally distributed category in an otherwise mobile system, did it becomepolitically conscious and activist. Only when a class happened to be (more or less)a nation did it turn from being a class-in-itself into a class-for-itself, or a nation-for-itself. Neither nations nor classes seem to be political catalysts: onlynation-classes or class-nations as such. (Gellner 1983: 121)

Three points emerge from all this. First, the anthropological concept ofculture, now in free circulation in many other disciplines, remains veryimportant and problematic. Despite a series of commentaries andcritiques (such as Kahn 1989) this flawed but indispensable termcontinues to be freighted with an intellectual baggage which cuts acrossthe best-intentioned analysis. One part of this baggage is the way culturecontinues to be associated with ‘a people’, and items of culture areassumed to be specific to ‘peoples’. This creates serious problems for thestudy of ethnic and nationalist movements, where the terms used inanalysis (‘Serbian culture’) risk obscuring precisely one of the themes ofthat analysis – the political process whereby certain cultural featurescome to be markers of Serbian identity – and social relations are polarisedaround selected lines of cultural difference. Clearly, there are manysituations where linguistic and cultural differences have hardened intosharp social boundaries; my argument is that they exist alongside othergroupings and lines of cleavage, and we need the term ‘culture’ to referto an aspect of all these relations, and not only the ethnic ones. If we failto widen the term, if culture is treated always and only as an ethnicphenomenon, ‘we make nationalists a present of their own ontology’ (touse Gellner’s own phrase, 1997: 94).

Secondly, Gellner’s account of the transition reveals that in manycases industrialism and the re-shaping of political and ethnic boundariesare disruptive but not particularly conflictual: people migrate, acquirenew skills, develop old and new cultural forms. In his accountnationalism generates major conflicts only when ethnic boundariescoincide with class boundaries; in other words we should understand


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nationalism not as the immemorial struggle of a people, but as aphenomenon which emerges in a recent period in association with theemergence of new social boundaries and rapid economic change. Thesechanges produced new forms of productive capital, new forms of wealthand knowledge; they destroyed and devalued other forms and led todislocation across the social spectrum. Some have analysed theseprocesses in terms of capitalism and uneven development, some inrelation to industrialisation. As grand theories attempting to produceglobal historical generalisations or identify a prime mover in the rise ofnationalism, these approaches diverge. When we look at the more fine-tuned historical or ethnographic analyses of nationalist movements,there is not such an unbridgeable gap between recent interpretationsworking within Weberian or Marxist traditions. Gellner probably neededthe joke about the wrong address at this point in his argument, as asmoke-screen to hide considerable convergence. From a differentperspective, Hroch (1998: 106) remarks,

I consider [Gellner’s critical objections to my book] a demonstration of his effortsto distance his explanation from Marxism, to which in his historical materialismhe was methodologically (though not politically) closer than most of the authorswho have dealt with the problem of ‘nationalism’.

Thirdly, on the issue of class politics, there is an unbridgeable gapbetween the Weberian and Marxist interpretations, and in my viewGellner weakens his account of nationalism by trying to develop ageneral theory of conflict in modern society, and by treating classmovements as an epiphenomenon of nationalism. In dealing with classconflicts he seems to be operating with only two kinds of politicaloutcome: either there was a successful revolution, or ‘nothing muchhappened’. Revolutionary failure is explained by the absence of the kindof political zeal which only ethnic differences can generate. This is notjust an eccentric view of the circumstances leading to revolutionarysuccess or failure – it leaves much twentieth-century political historytotally in the dark.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

If we look at successful analyses of political movements, those whichilluminate how and why they arose, which provide insights forcomparative work, we find that they contain at least three strands. Thefirst is that they contextualise the movements in relation to the majorhistorical processes of the society in which they emerge. Indeed manyimportant features of these movements are normally explained by such

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social transformations: capitalism and class movements, modernity andnationalism, post-modernity and new social movements. In practice thecorrelations are not so simple and the task of contextualising is very open-ended. The range of transformations which are relevant to an analysiscan be illustrated from material in this book. In urban areas such as Milanand Bilbao we find rapid industrial growth which draws in labour andundermines existing patterns of production. In rural areas, such asAndalusia, southern Italy and later the Balkans, we find the liberalreforms of property rights in land. Everywhere we find the widening ofmarkets, not as a one-off event but as a process which continues into thepresent, affecting regional economies and particular categories of thepopulation. The consolidation and then the collapse of communistcommand economies transformed rural–urban relations, ethnicity andeverything else in eastern Europe. State centralisation and thedevelopment of citizenship have a well-documented impact onnationalism, as have the growth of literacy and compulsory schoolingon societies with linguistic pluralism. International processes, such asthe Cold War and the growth of the European Union, all affect the politicalmovements we shall be examining. Contextualising will always beunfinished and involve analytical difficulties, but better unfinished thanunstarted. There are accounts of nationalism, for example, which areinadequate because they recount it as the millennial struggle of a peoplein a world unmarked by economic, political or cultural transformations.

The second and third strands of analysis I shall refer to as ‘movementand discourse’. These are not new terms or new issues in politicalanalysis, but I am particularly indebted to Sewell’s (1990) formulationof the problem in his discussion of the ‘making’ of the working class. Heinsists both on the close linkage of these two levels, and on the need tothink about them separately, and I shall start with ‘movement’, since itis simpler.

Political mobilisation requires organisation, and this takes manyforms: cells, parties, unions, co-operatives, mutual aid associations, clubs,cultural circles. These are embedded in local patterns of work andrecreation, but they are also very often federated into a higher-levelorganisation which constitutes the movement. This involves co-ordination between local groupings and a system of decision-making –and both require communication. This may be personal and clandestineas in the ‘underground’ movements; more commonly communicationis written, while the movement encourages literacy, needs printingpresses, and generates its own communiqués, newspapers, texts andlibraries. Activists in any movement spend the greater part of their timein meetings and rallies, or printing, distributing and reading information.


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These are the activities and organisations which build a social base; theyhave their own social composition and political culture; democratic orautocratic ways of operating. These organisations are the base fromwhich strategic action to transform society can be launched.

Under ‘movement’ we can include the repertoire of political action:demonstrations, tax strikes, workplace strikes, sabotage, occupations ofland, factories or city centres, general strikes, burning churches or taxrecords, guerrilla warfare, armed insurrection. This repertoire is itself animportant part of the picture. Historians (Tilly 1978) have shown howit has grown and evolved along with changes in the organisation ofproduction and in the technology available to the state. So the repertoirereflects changes in the field of power, though not without some ‘inertia’,and obviously varies according to the strategic objectives of themovement. But there is more to it than that. Political movements do nothave rigid boundaries, since what they do is create processes of inclusionand exclusion which affect everybody who lives in a particularenvironment. This involves patterns of socialisation at work and afterwork, in public and private arenas, linguistic codes, speaking withauthority or being marginalised. In the local context the movementreflects and modifies existing social differences, even those which havelittle connection with the overt purpose of the movement itself. In manyof the cases we shall be examining, an atmosphere of generalised con-testation leads to radical polarisation. Social divides are created throughthe movement’s action, first through everyday forms of inclusion andexclusion, more dramatically in strategies like the general strike. But themost enduring social divisions are created through violence, as we shallsee in a number of the case studies.

The subject of a political movement is a collectivity, actual andpotential: its discourse articulates who that collectivity are, and theirhistorical purpose. In the case of class, Sewell (1990: 70) has arguedthat the emergence of class discourse ‘took place by a relatively suddenconceptual breakthrough during a period of intense political struggle’.It universalised traditional solidarities, established solidarity betweenworkers of all trades, and empowered them to make collective claimsabout property and power (Sewell 1990: 71). The breakthroughemerged through a transformation of pre-existing political and religioustraditions; once in existence the discourse could survive the collapse ofa political organisation, and of course be spread to other societies.Something very similar can be said of nationalist discourse, which buildson, for example, existing conceptions of state sovereignty and loyalty,or local notions of commonality through blood and kinship, buttransforms them. A nation is a people, a collectivity with shared

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attributes, which claims political rights on that basis. The collectiveinterest alone forms the basis for legitimate government, and thegovernment, in turn, claims that the interests of the nation takeprecedence over all others in the lives of its citizens. Benedict Andersonhas done much to illuminate the overall conceptual shift such aninnovation represents – and with others has shown how pervasively thismodel was borrowed and naturalised once invented.

One central feature of all these discourses is that they are concernedwith identity: they define who ‘we’ are. Identity is a notoriously slipperyconcept, and ‘identity politics’ is particularly problematic since itconnotes the kinds of movement (based on gender, sexual orientation orethnicity) which are said to emerge when class politics collapses. It is toolarge a task to disentangle why some kinds of politics are thought toinvolve identities and some are not, or the many ways identities havebeen conceptualised and analysed. For our purposes the most usefulapproach which has emerged treats identity as a narrative, definingboundaries and oppositions. Narratives position collectivities in socialprocesses, and in time and space. In addition to telling the story of whowe are, they contain a ‘meta’ level – an account of why the collectivityexists, derived from assumptions about why the world is as it is. Theseassumptions may be explicit and theorised in a Marxist-derived accountof the proletariat, more implicit in a discourse which understands nationsto be enduring and natural units, and history to be an unending saga ofcompetition and alliance between them. Each discourse thus also has itsown historicity, its own time-frames and tacit criteria for what constitutesignificant events. A communist history of capitalism; an anarchisthistory of liberty and oppression; a nationalist history of Serbia: eachselects and makes meaning in different ways.

Identity narratives can be thought of as organised along two axes. Oneis biographical: it says who are the Basques, or the working class,through the medium of time, an axis with a horizontal line runningthrough past, present and future. As we shall see, class and nationalistmovements give different interpretations to this time dimension. Theother axis is vertical; it establishes who ‘we’ are through opposition andthe creation of an ‘other’ – an area which has been explored extensivelyin research on nationalism and racism. An identity discourse fuses thetwo axes – the diachronic and the synchronic – so that it is a history ofenduring ‘opposition’. However, in certain contexts one dimension oranother of identity may become more salient, as when political actionfocuses on an external enemy, or the movement celebrates its unbrokenhistory and the work of the ancestors.


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I first thought about these two axes while listening to a seminar paperbased on life-histories collected from elderly people who had come toBritain as migrants. Informants had produced accounts of their natalvillages, migration, family reunion, the difficulty of bringing up children,the tension between the desire to return home in old age and the needsof the next generation, together with a concern about the death ritualswhich re-affirm cultural identity. These narratives were interspersedwith anecdotes which spoke of another context – for example factoryemployment and work culture, the (riotous) getting and spending ofmoney with their British workmates. These were parentheses, sidewaysglances, revealing the existence of other social identities in a biographicnarrative which was structured overall by concern with cultural con-tinuities. I mention this source not because it provides an exact parallel,but as a reminder that identity is multifaceted and contextual, and thatthe analytical issues raised in this book overlap with other fields ofanthropology. It is also a reminder that there are many kinds ofnarrative, from the lone voice to the official histories compiled by themovements themselves. We shall be concerned with collective narrativesgenerated within a movement, more or less stable over time and moreor less standardised in their form – if the movement ‘captures’ the state,then they become more stable. However, I am aware that the term‘collective’ begs many questions: How does a particular narrative becomeauthoritative within a movement? To what extent do people recognisetheir own experience in that authoritative version or dissent from it?These issues will surface often in the case studies, because they arerelevant to the analysis of the movements themselves, but some of themore fine-tuned ethnographic questions will be squeezed out by the spaceavailable and the nature of the material we are dealing with.

NATIONALISM AGAIN

Having set out a general framework, we can return to specific questionsabout nationalist and class politics. Gellner and Anderson belong, indifferent ways, to a school of analysis which stresses that nations areconstructed through a political process, and that this happens in themodern period. It happens through the mobilisation of populationsseeking recognition of their political rights (usually, but not necessarily,to become a new state), or through the cultural policies of establishedstates. The rights are those of a ‘people’, conceived either as a boundedgroup sharing a common culture, or as a race, or as a mixture of the two.A people are defined by their common identity, and nationhood can onlybe established historically, through demonstrating what does not change

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over time. These narratives of the nation often have a foundationalmoment (a birth through migration, conversion to Christianity, a battleof liberation or subjugation) and then move on to recount a series ofevents – further victories or defeats against an enemy other for example– which confirm the destiny or transcendent qualities of the people. Theapparent paradox of using history to talk about the things that do notchange (and there is no other way of establishing what does not change)means that nations have to argue their own antiquity, an issue whichlies at the heart of the debates in the study of nationalism. Those whooppose a purely modern origin of nations – a group sometimes called,slightly misleadingly, the ‘primordialists’ – stress the continuitiesbetween present-day nations and much earlier social formations. At thispoint it is important to make clear what is at stake in this debate, and itis not just any kind of historical continuity. Any group can point to someaspect of its culture – be it language, religion or embroidered waistcoats– which distinguishes it from another group and predates modernity bymany centuries. Everybody alive has ancestors going back to the originsof the human species. What is at stake is the historical continuity of apeople (either as a society with a unified culture, or as a race), and thehistorical stability of a boundary between peoples.

Most historians have argued that, in societies which were over-whelmingly rural and feudal, the claim that lords and ruling elites shareda common culture with the peasants was both untrue and subversive ofthe existing order. In a few political circumstances some version of thatclaim would emerge, but it became the dominant framework only whenEurope was re-organised into a system of states, each of which claimedto be the legitimate manifestation of the rights of a people. In Europe, thisconcept of a people, and ‘their deep horizontal comradeship’ – to useAnderson’s (1983) phrase – erupted onto the political scene with theFrench Revolution. Rather than seeing pre-existing cultural forms anddivides as providing the blue-print for the map of nation-states, we shouldsee culture as a contested terrain, providing one framework for the artic-ulation of various political claims. In the nation-building process, whatwe refer to as culture undergoes a subtle shift, from a lived-in series ofshared understandings to a collection of politicised representations whichembody or symbolise the nation. It is a shift from culture-in-itself toculture-for-itself, as Gellner might have said.

The politicisation of culture occurs in the establishment of both theboundaries of the nation (the ‘vertical’ axis of an identity narrative) andwhat constitutes the common culture of a people (which tends to beestablished through a horizontal time-line of historical continuity). Infixing external boundaries there is a great deal of flexibility andopportunism. What cultural features made the people of the southern


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Tyrol Italian but the people of Savoy French – much to Garibaldi’sannoyance, since he was born there? Internally, the task of delimiting acommon culture led some forms of nationalism, particularly in easternEurope, to re-work and recontextualise peasant or folk culture as the coreof their identity. Others, like Italy, were originally established ‘againstthe peasant’ and elaborated a national identity around an elite culture ofclassical civilisation. As Beissinger remarks (1998: 175), ‘Nationalismis not simply about imagined communities; it is much more fundamen-tally a struggle for control over defining communities – and particularlya struggle for control over the imagination about community.’ Whatcounts as national culture is not some totality, but the parts which aredistinctive; not static, but the result of competition between variousgroups to define the key experiences.

As I indicated at the beginning, the research agenda on nationalism isvery rich, and my intention in the case studies is to emphasise certainstrands within it. The main problem is that analyses which stress thatnations are constructed have to work against the grain of phrases(‘French culture’, for example) which imply that ‘cultures’ can bemapped quite simply onto ‘peoples’. Using the term ‘constructed’, orsaying that they are ‘imagined’, should not be thought to imply any lackof reality in either state boundaries or the processes through whichnational identities emerge. It is simply a way of stressing that accountsof the emergence and evolution of national identities have to be rootedin a social and political context: how linguistic or religious differenceswithin a society are embedded in social relations, how they co-exist withother sets of differences, how they can become ethnic markers. In orderto understand the forces which set nationalism in motion we need to lookat a broad range of issues – shifts in the economy, state centralisation,cultural policy – and their effects on specific groups: the response of localpolitical elites, the fate of peasants in the Basque country, or of the youngurban unemployed as the Yugoslav economy collapsed in the 1980s. Weknow that nationalism appears in periods of change, and that it combinesold themes in new projects, but beyond that generalisation is difficult andsometimes merely reductive, since what appears crucial is the interactionbetween these long-term processes in specific social settings. That said,in the conclusion I shall explore some specific arguments aboutnationalism and the demise of rural society within Europe.

CLASS

In the social sciences and outside them, class denotes a very wide rangeof phenomena. The most neutral definitions refer to ‘structured economic

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inequality’ (Coole 1996: 17), acknowledging that this covers a variety oftheoretical positions. Within the Marxist tradition class generally refersto a structural position within a production system; other sociologicaltraditions employ a broader usage of class as a category of people definedby their occupation or income levels, while at the furthest extreme fromthe Marxist tradition we encounter a purely statistical model of socialstratification. These usages are themselves embedded in differentanalytical concerns, from mapping patterns of consumer behaviour toexplaining the reproduction of structured inequality within society orthe dynamics of capital.

‘Class politics’ has almost as wide a range of referents, from the micro-politics of snobbery to revolutionary drama. As a term it can include theway governments increase or decrease structural inequality throughtaxation and education policies, or the way in which people create,accommodate to, or resist such inequality in their daily lives. Bourdieu(1984) for example has been concerned with class politics in the sense ofa diffuse system of discrimination and exclusion centred on lifestyles andcultural capitals. This is significantly different from class politics as thelarge-scale mobilisation of people to transform the organisation of societyand its government. All these overlapping connotations and concernsare bound to create confusion, so it is worth clarifying at the beginningthat this book is primarily concerned with these class movements andonly tangentially with other processes.

Unfortunately this clarification does not tidy away all the definitionalproblems, since analysis of class mobilisation inevitably evokes ‘a class’(as yet undefined) which is mobilised. It involves questions about therelationship between economic and political processes, and the shiftingdefinitions of class in our account of this relationship. This emerges mostfamously in the Marxist formulae about how a ‘class-in-itself’ canbecome a ‘class-for-itself’. A structural position, defined analytically aspart of an economic relationship, becomes a category of people (theproletariat) who then acquire consciousness and become politicalsubjects. In fact the debates about class-in-itself and class-for-itself haveraised some of the most enduring issues found in the social sciences:determination, structure and agency, the existence of historical laws.Within that debate some have argued that classes are ‘given’ as aneconomic category by the organisation of production, and that thecomposition of the political movement is congruent with the economiccategory, give or take a few intellectuals who are necessary forgenerating consciousness. And that is the point: class as a political termis an economic category with added consciousness. Others want to breakwith these more reductive models, arguing that class mobilisation is a


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response to a variety of processes – to not only the divisions created bysystems of production, but also political and cultural processes which arenot derived from some universal logic of capitalism. Class movementsinterpret economic processes, and as a result they create solidarities indifferent ways, so that their composition varies and their politicalagendas go beyond what is conventionally referred to as the ‘economic’.

In this second body of writing, we find the argument that rather thanclasses pre-existing their mobilisation, class is constructed throughmobilisation, in a society marked by structured economic inequality.Class, in this sense, is constructed politically, and hence, in part, isconstructed ‘discursively’. Marxism is doubly important in this context,because it gave rise not just to theoretically sophisticated analyses ofcapitalist society, but also to very powerful political movements. Anyattempt to analyse class movements in the twentieth century thereforehas to deal with the impact of Marxism on those movements, and a smallstep in that direction is taken in two of the case studies. It is a difficulttask, not least because of the long shadow Marxism has cast amongstsocial scientists. Many, having moved away from the theory because ofits teleological elements, have also become completely uninterested inthe kinds of phenomena which they were once trying to explain; others,who were never themselves Marxists, have perpetuated a very narrowview of the scope of these movements, and a reductive account of therelationship between economic and political organisation. One placewhere this becomes a problem is in disentangling arguments that the lifeand death of class movements are linked directly to the fate of theindustrial proletariat. In fact, historical studies have shown that classmovements were rural as much as urban, inspired by anarchist ideals aswell as by socialism, and mobilised not just wage-labourers but a broadspectrum of economic actors, in a variety of emancipatory programmes.

By keeping sight of this variety we will also make better sense of ‘newsocial movements’, an over-generalised category which first emerged inarguments about the death of class and what was to come next. There hasbeen a romantic tendency to portray all these movements as progressive,whereas many of the most important recent political developments inEurope have involved direct action to defend corporate interests, themobilisation of racism, and opposition to immigration. Some do representa break with class politics, attempting to create collectivities and coalitionsaround a new political agenda; others are a continuation of politicalstrategies and aspirations which were common in class movements inEurope and elsewhere. The older revolutionary movements are unlikelyto return to the political arena, but revisiting them can still give us somecritical understanding of the world in which we live, and form a base-line

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for assessing the new strategies and coalitions at work in contemporaryanti-corporate and ‘anti-global’ movements.

These comments have implications for the three strands in the anthro-pology of political movements outlined above. The analysis of classmovements has always involved the first strand – that of contextualis-ing them in relation to long-term economic processes – since this hasbeen the dominant mode of explanation, sometimes deployed in a rathermechanical way. I shall use a broad range of historical and ethnographicstudies, chosen to demonstrate that class politics was not synonymouswith the history of wage-labour, or of manufacturing industry. They alsoallow us to explore the different levels at which these movements operate,and the way they shaped each other. For example, ‘the working class’ asa political entity was never a simple aggregate of local workers’ organ-isations or communities of resistance, since the national andinternational levels fed back down to modify the boundaries, strategiesand objectives of class action.

By broadening the picture we also open up the second and thirdstrands of analysis, which involve the political construction of classthrough mobilisation and the variety of discourses which define classidentity. These include ideas about how people realise themselvesthrough work, or how their social being is defined through workrelations. The movements were certainly active on wages, piecework andthe kinds of issue which occupy present-day trade-unionism, but thesewere combined with a more radical programme on property rights andinterpretations of the relationship between owner and labourer whichreversed the normal notions of dependency. They were also concernedwith the public sphere and social justice, contesting control of publicspaces, developing critiques of church teaching on gender, and of manyother forms of social hierarchy. This is one of the reasons for theirenduring interest.

There are many ways of dealing with the cultural aspects of classmovements. I have concentrated on the identity narratives, and on theextensive critiques of existing social relations in which they areembedded. I have given less space to discussion of their symbolic andritual activity. It seems to me that symbolism is sometimes givenprominence because it appears to offer a way of dealing with theemotional aspects of political life, in a framework where (to return to theopening comments) interests and passions are seen as alternative andopposed motives for action. It is not necessary to portray these passionsas an irrational dimension in political life, requiring separate treatment– as though emotions start when reason stops. Red flags are defendedand fought over: they are profoundly moving to a movement’s


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supporters; they make the movement visible as songs make it audible;they speak of harmony and presence, power and defiance. They are thefocus for solidarity, and sometimes for divisiveness, but solidarity is notan end in itself, and when solidarity collapses it is not a failure ofsymbolism. Symbols are indeed important, but we shall grasp them betterif we put them back into the rich ‘counter-culture’ articulated by eachmovement and into the context of purposeful action.

In sketching a common framework for the study of politicalmovements, there is no intention of flattening out the importantdifferences between them, even if these differences do not always lie inthe factors suggested by the canonical texts. At the outset we can suggesta number of themes which provide a provisional set of contrasts. Thenationalist movements attempt to unify a group of people they considerto be related through descent, in order to secede from the existing state.Their discourses stress homes and homelands, and their identitynarratives are strongly historical, established through continuitybetween the present and the past. Class movements create horizontalsolidarity in order to achieve a transformation of the existing state, or toabolish it. Their discourses stress relations established at work and in theworkplace, and their identity narratives have a strong future orientation:the workers are defined around who they will become. These contrastswill need some qualification as the ethnography unfolds and new themesemerge. The similarities derive from the fact that in each case weencounter people living through periods of rapid change and dislocationwho forge an identity and an interpretation of history which makes theirown values and experiences central in a narrative of how society shouldbe, and forge a political strategy to make that happen.

As stated earlier, the argument of this book is built up through casestudies which allow us to explore these political movements as the inter-section of a variety of social and cultural processes. My intention is thateach chapter should be free-standing for certain purposes – useful forthose seeking information on a particular area – while the comparativeand cumulative issues are brought together in generalising chapters andsections which intercut the case studies. Other ways of organising thematerial, such as surveys or thematic summaries, would have allowedthe inclusion of more examples, but put a different kind of strain on thereader – and in fact pulled apart the interconnections which are centralto the overall analysis. No one volume could deal with class andnationalist movements comprehensively on a pan-European basis; thatsaid, a case-study approach is selective in a more obvious way.

The material analysed comes from various periods, from the beginningof the twentieth century to the present day, and from contiguous societies

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which run in an arc round southern Europe from Spain through Franceand Italy to Yugoslavia. This choice has been shaped positively by thestrengths of the available literature, and negatively by the limits of myown knowledge. It is only one possible ‘cross-section’ of Europe, but it isa particularly interesting one. It contains within it examples of virtuallyall the major political currents of recent European history, from fascismto anarchism and communism, with Christian Democrats, liberals,populists and many others in between. These are varied and dramaticpolitical environments, dominated by movements which made sustainedattempts to transform the state, and which questioned, from a variety ofperspectives, the legitimacy of existing governments to represent thepeople. Some themes crop up repeatedly in these studies, most notablythe political responses to the crisis of rural Europe in the twentiethcentury. By taking a more limited range of cases (for example, byexcluding Yugoslavia and the excursion into France) it would have beenpossible to engage with the work of those who have argued for aparticular south European pattern of economic and political development(Hadjimichalis 1986; Hudson and Lewis 1985). The strategy here isdifferent: to explore a varied cross-section in the hope that it has wideranalytical relevance, rather than demarcate a region and build anargument around its specific history. The reasons for this choice will beclearer if we look briefly at the relationship between theoretical paradigmsand the emergence of regional specialisation within anthropology.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND REGIONS

The central fact here is that what anthropologists find, in this or that place, farfrom being independent data for the construction and verification of theory, isin fact a very complicated compound of local realities and the contingencies ofmetropolitan theory. (Appadurai 1986: 360, quoted in Fardon 1990: 24)

We notice, however, that for Kapferer, the only ‘conditions’ that are seen to beoperating upon the formation of knowledges are those of being ‘inside’ (as thenative is) or ‘outside’ (as the anthropologist is) the culture under investigation.(D. Scott 1994: 129)

The great nineteenth-century social theorists generated a series ofconceptual dichotomies in their attempt to understand the ongoing trans-formations of Europe. By the twentieth century these had, in turn, fedinto a division of labour within the social sciences which left anthropol-ogy responsible for the task of understanding ‘pre-capitalist’,‘gemeinschaft’, ‘traditional’ social forms, which it did primarily throughmethods employing ‘one fieldworker plus tent’ (Hann, 2001). While thisperiod lasted, British and American anthropology did not occupy itself


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with Europe. Only in the 1960s, through a series of conferences and pub-lications, were the scattered studies of rural life consolidated and renderedvisible through the construction of the Mediterranean as a region.Anthropologists still stayed on one side of the traditional–modernhyphen, concentrating on the life of rural communities and framinganalysis around the search for social and cultural forms (honour,patronage, godparenthood) which were common to the Mediterraneanarea. In 1977 John Davis published People of the Mediterranean, an ency-clopaedic overview of this anthropological work (all other social sciencecontributions were rigorously excluded), but its appearance more or lesscoincided with a complete shift in the scenery.

After that date anthropologists continued to study moral systems andlocalised practices involving gender, status and the person, but in wayswhich became more sophisticated when freed from the assumption thatthese were in any simple sense ‘traditional’ or had to be analysed as partof a Mediterranean culture. Alongside them emerged research which ineffect reconceptualised the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’, studying localprocesses in relation to capitalist development, state formation or Vaticanreforms. There were strong critiques of assumptions that boundedcommunities constituted an adequate framework for analysis, or thatfieldworkers were studying lands that time forgot. In a variety of waysanthropologists engaged with historical materials in the interpretationof contemporary realities. Much of the renewed ambition and anthro-pological innovation of the 1970s derived from the work of Eric Wolf andhis students: out of this and other contributions came new frameworks,such as centre–periphery relations and Europe itself as an analyticalcategory. There was nothing monolithic about the results: both theoryand research moved in a number of directions. European social sciencetraditions started to make an appearance in the English-speaking world,while some established scholars broke new ground, and some youngerscholars attempted to revive the Mediterranean paradigm and the studyof communities. As a result the developments of the last 25 years can betold from a variety of perspectives: the introduction to Goddard, Lloberaand Shore (1994) is a very useful overview, and gives references to manyof the other relevant historical summaries. Here I want to make twopoints which are specific to the issues raised by this book.

First, the emergence of a region as a focus for anthropological inquirybuilds on empirical and theoretical assumptions about the priority ofcertain social and cultural phenomena. ‘Regions’ make some thingscentral, defining; others marginal or invisible. From work within theMediterranean paradigm we learned a great deal about certain kinds ofcultural phenomena; we learned very little about colonialism, urban

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industrial centres, or the politics of religious or class identities. The lateremergence of an anthropology of Europe marks not just a geographicalredefinition, but a shift in analytical focus, not least towards processes ofeconomic and political integration. However, the issues are definedprimarily around processes within western Europe and the EuropeanUnion; eastern Europe remains another kind of specialisation, at leastuntil the collapse of communism. We should also note that, 20 yearsafter the first moves to establish an anthropology of Europe, we still knowmore about the subtle sociological variations between Greek villages thanwe do about Germany. Regional generalisation involves selectivity inresearch and the emergence of a consensus about the centrality of certainphenomena in the analysis of why a society is as it is. These paradigmsgo with the territory; that does not make them valueless, provided thatwe are aware of the limits of their explanatory power, and that for certainkinds of research we shall have to break with them.

This leads on to the second point: for anybody interested in politicalmovements there is a particular problem with this anthropologicalliterature because of the way it deals with culture and identities. Therehas been a very strong tendency to concentrate the analysis on aspectsof culture which belong to territorially-based entities (like the Mediter-ranean), or ‘peoples’ in the sense of nations and ethnic groups. The focuson social entities, which are indeed defined by their common culture, isone of the strengths of the anthropological tradition, but it can also leadto a narrowing of the range of cultural phenomena analysed, in a waywhich vitiates even the study of nationalism. If culture is invariablyconnected to ‘peoples’ then, as noted above, we risk naturalisingnationalism, and are likely to marginalise the study of other politicalmovements built around other identities and other kinds of culture. Someof these have considerable historical importance, such as thedevelopment of Catholic social doctrine and Christian Democracy, or thetransnational peasant populism of eastern Europe.

It is in the study of class politics that the anthropological paradigmsaround culture and identity become most problematic. One example weshall be dealing with is the anarchist movement in rural Andalusia, aform of politics which is so unlike much of the European ‘mainstream’left that many writers have dwelt on its irrational or millennial charac-teristics, or the archaic social conditions which must have generated it.But anarchism was not just found in Andalusia, and a short summary ofa movement in southern Italy will allow me to make one concludingpoint about the purposes of this book.

After Italian unification, property in the central plains of Pugliabecame concentrated in latifundia, while three-quarters of the


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population were landless labourers resident in sprawling urban centres(the ‘agro-towns’). The labourers worked ‘from sun to sun’ for the intensemonths of the wheat cycle and then suffered unemployment. Anyonewho wants evidence of the depths of routine misery and brutality to befound in parts of southern Europe in the early twentieth century shouldread the description of a ‘Company Town’ in Frank Snowden’smonograph Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy. But as inAndalusia it was wealth, and its conspicuous concentration, whichspurred political radicalisation.

Snowden (1986: 116) says that the resulting political movement wassocialist in name, while syndicalism remained the substance. Theworkers supported the Socialist Party at elections, but remained a radicalcurrent within it: they were highly critical of the reformist tendencies ofthe parliamentary leadership, who in turn considered the southernersbackward and impulsive. More important than the party were localsections (leghe) which organised employees, and the chambers of labour,which built bridges between the struggles of the (temporarily) employed,and those of unemployed men and women. As in Andalusia, this dualstructure mobilised opposition in the workplace and on a territorial basis.The general strike was adopted as the most effective form of action,halting all economic activity and sealing off the town even for thetransport of food and water. Even the mobilising slogan, ‘All of us or noone’ echoes those of Andalusia.

Strikes in the early part of the century found the landlords unprepared– they either capitulated or responded with violence, using privatestrong-arm men and the army. Both outcomes further radicalised themovement (Snowden 1986: 100). There were significant gains on wagesand working conditions, but the revolutionary goal remained the social-isation of the land. Alongside this, as Snowden (1986: 109) insists, wereaspirations for moral reform and social equality; indeed, in the short run,local activists gave them priority. This involved social advancementthrough literacy classes, curbs on alcoholism and delinquency, and thepressing of the claim to equality as human beings through the occupationof public spaces and a break with deferential forms of behaviour.

Feminism was an integral part of the politics of anarcho-syndicalism. Hierarchyin any form was anathema to its libertarian ethos. A continuous effort was madeto raise the consciousness of women’s rights, to encourage women to take anactive political role ... One of the most effective speakers the movement possessedwas the anarchist feminist Maria Rygier, whose oratory was so powerful thateven landlords came out of curiosity to see her. (Snowden 1986: 114–15)

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By 1920 the movement had strengthened and was co-ordinated on aregional basis, and represented a direct challenge to the power of thestate. As in other regions, the landlords put their resources into the fascistmovement. Repression took longer than in the north, where the morecentralised left-wing movements were decapitated quickly, but acombination of contract killings, fire-bombs and squadristi working inopen collaboration with the police insured that, by the middle of 1922,here too no opposition remained above ground (Snowden 1986:175–202).

Two countries, one political culture. However one handles the reasons,there is a remarkable convergence between Andalusia and Puglia, intheir rural hierarchies, their forms of political action and mobilisation,and their moral understandings and representations. In the beginninganthropology went looking for elements of a pan-Mediterranean culturecommon to peasants, shepherds and townspeople, and located it inhonour codes, godparenthood, and aspects of spiritual belief. The kind ofconvergence annotated above escaped the net. As the Mediterraneanresearch agenda lost momentum, national and ethnic particularity tookover. Reading certain monographs, it is as though the anthropologist’sinformants woke up every morning asking ‘Who am I?’, to which theonly conceivable answer was ‘I am Greek’ (or Romanian, or Irish). Whenattention shifts to large-scale political movements – and it is rare unlessthey are based on ethnicity – the analysis is so imbricated in local usage,linguistic particularity and symbolic subtleties that it is hard to see howsuch a movement could ever have emerged except in that specific context.Incomparability reigns supreme and the anthropologist translatesbetween cultures. There are some important exceptions – for exampleAya (1975), who compared political movements in Sicily and Andalusia,and the very important contemporary work by Holmes (2000), whoseanalysis of pan-European ‘populism’ will be discussed in chapter 8. Oneof the purposes of this book is to build on this and other research in orderto loosen the anthropological concept of culture from its assimilation toethnicity, and re-explore alternative bases for comparison.

ORGANISATION AND THEMES OF THE BOOK

The themes of the three chapters on class movements have been chosento show their diversity. Chapter 2 deals with the evolution of politicalaction amongst industrial workers in northern Italy, using sources onSesto San Giovanni near Milan and on Gramsci’s Turin factory councilsprior to fascism. It explores the forging of class identity in a labour forcecomposed of artisans and ‘unskilled’ labourers, and the impact of


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Marxism on that process. It is here that we first encounter the importanceof the future tense and the revolutionary road in the narratives con-structing class divisions.

Chapter 3 looks at the anarchist movement in rural Andalusia fromthe mid-nineteenth century to the Civil War, a period characterised byextraordinary economic stasis and the repeated use of military force bythe Spanish state. It begins with the moral absolutism of the struggle andthe discursive connections which were made between revolution anddestruction. It then goes on to analyse the organisation of production onthe big estates, their relationship with the pueblo, the social bases forsolidarity and general features of anarchist political practice.

Chapter 4 continues the analysis of identity and the revolutionary roadin relation to a period of class mobilisation which did not involve aproletariat – that of the share-cropping movement in the red belt ofcentral Italy that was led by the Communist Party. It explores thestrategy of a western Communist Party during the Cold War, illustrat-ing the way global politics are incorporated into and transform localstruggles, and the long-term consequences for the share-croppersthemselves. It concludes with a commentary on the attempt to achievea revolutionary transformation through strategic reforms in ademocracy, and the increasing stress on identification with the politicaltraditions of the party in the period from 1945 to 1990.

Chapter 5 returns to the theoretical issues arising from using class as aneconomic and political category, and then reviews the convergences anddivergences which emerge in the three examples. It is organised aroundthe themes of movement and discourse, and discusses in particular thecontrasts between communist and anarchist political cultures.

The next two chapters are extended analyses of two ethno-nationalistmovements – those of the Basque provinces and the former Yugoslavia.There is more research on this kind of politics within anthropology, andthe examples were chosen because of their contemporary politicalimportance, as well as to provide coverage of both eastern and westernEurope – a divide which emerges frequently in the theoretical literature.Chapter 6 analyses Basque nationalism from 1890 to 1990 on the basisof a very rich and voluminous literature. The first part traces theemergence of a narrative of loss amongst the urban intellectuals and thepetty-bourgeoisie, and its incorporation into the social and moral mapof the rural population. This leads to a discussion of ethnogenesis (theformation of a group defined ethnically), and some of the problems withthe anthropological category of ethnicity. The final part deals with thepost-Franco period and the problems ETA has posed for a democraticgovernment by its strategy of violence and armed insurgency.

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Chapter 7 analyses the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in relationto the complex patterns of economic and cultural differentiation withinYugoslav society in the twentieth century. This is a shorter but broaderbackground than the standard ‘600 years of Serbian history’, andinvolves setting out a number of themes. We shall look at how culturaldiversity emerged in the practices involving kinship and neighbourhood,how the state recognised and institutionalised nations and minorities,and how both of these levels of cultural difference were affected by thetransformation of peasant/urban relations, as well as by the developmentand collapse of a ‘command’ economy. The chapter then discusses thepolitical strategies of the dominant groups which emerged in the late1980s, and the reactions of the ‘international community’ to the collapseof communism. The most general issue raised by the chapter is onceagain the problem of ethnicity, but it emerges out of an examination ofthe way in which the term has been employed by political commenta-tors and the media as an explanation of violence in the Balkans.

Chapter 8 returns to general questions about nationalism, and pullstogether the case material on nation-building – as a political process, associal transformation, and as a cultural framework. It then looks atwhether the themes which have emerged as characteristic of class andnationalist movements can to some extent be combined. Evidence for thiscomes from the existence of movements which articulate a potentmixture of class and regional or ethnic identity. The rest of the chapterlooks more briefly at two movements (in southern France and northernItaly) which have this hybrid quality, and raises questions aboutpopulism and the dynamics of contemporary European politics.

Chapter 9 is a conclusion which draws some themes together, botharound the anthropology of political movements and the politics ofsouthern Europe. We shall go back to the question of identity andnarratives, and to the way, for example, that an over-arching discourseof class or nation ‘speaks to’ the experience of people in local settings.There are also interesting parallels in these movements which derivefrom the politics of polarisation. However, I think that the mostinteresting result of bringing this material together is the possibility itoffers to ask questions about the process of modernisation, and theconcept of modernity. One substantive dimension of this is the demise ofrural society – a much more recent phenomenon than most people(especially in Britain) realise, documented in Table 9.1 on p. 188. Thistransformation has had a profound political impact, and Nairn (1997)has explored this in a recent article on nationalism. Though critical ofhis representation of rurality, I think we are all indebted to him for thebrilliant introduction of the symbol of Janus into our thinking about


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nationalism and modernity. There are ‘backward-’ and ‘forward-looking’aspects to all these movements, in the struggle over autonomy inproduction as well as in the more familiar evocations of rural idylls. Thereare also intricate questions about the way the past is evoked in thesediscourses, about what changes are represented as progress, and whetherthey are reversible.

A final note to the reader: in writing this book, one of the trickierdecisions concerned a style of presentation which would give adequatereferences while making the text as streamlined and accessible aspossible. I have dispensed with footnotes and avoided over-meticulousreferences to every theoretical discussion in a field which alreadycontains a number of synthesising studies. Instead there is a short guideto sources at the end of each case study and a cumulative bibliographyat the end of the book.

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2 NORTHERN ITALY: ‘A WORLD TO WIN’

Sesto San Giovanni was a suburban village with a number of artisanworkshops and small silk mills, five miles north of the centre of Milan ina fertile farming area. In 1840 the railway linking Milan to Monza wasbuilt, and in 1882 the tunnel under the St Gotthard Pass provided a raillink to the territories north of the Alps. Power came down from themountains – hydro-electric power which could now be transported longdistances. By the end of the century, the population of Sesto had grownto 7,000 inhabitants, still mostly employed in farming or in small-scaleworkshops, but it had the space, location, communications links andsupplies for a major industrial centre. Between 1900 and 1914 many ofItaly’s most important industrial firms moved into the district – firms likeFalck, Breda, Marelli, Campari, Pirelli – with a particular concentrationin the engineering sector. On to the old nucleus of Sesto was grafted anew town of giant factories and workers’ houses, built in a grid patternand often owned by the industrial firms. By 1920 the resident populationhad tripled to nearly 20,000 inhabitants, but this was only thebeginning. By 1944 the engineering firm Breda alone employed 12,000workers. Growth continued in the years of Italy’s economic miracle inthe 1950s and 1960s, and although many firms then collapsed orrelocated, at the end of the twentieth century Sesto had a population ofnearly 100,000.

If Sesto has a hundred-year history as one of the primary industrialcentres of Italy, it also has a long tradition of political radicalism whichbegan immediately after the First World War. This was a period whenthe demobilisation of conscript armies and the shock waves from theBolshevik revolution generated political uprisings across Europe, fromAndalusia to Bavaria. In Sesto the Socialists captured the town councilin 1920, at the beginning of two years of tumultuous political activity(the biennio rosso), of strikes, demonstrations and factory occupations.The fascist reaction began with the brutal killing of left-wing activists inSesto. Under fascism there continued to exist a militant communistunderground, while the partisan organisations during the later stages

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of the Second World War earned Sesto the epithet of ‘Italy’s Stalingrad’.The Communist Party emerged as the dominant political force in thedecades after 1945.

I have chosen to start the case studies with Sesto because it is preciselythe kind of place where we would expect class politics to emerge: a majorindustrial centre with a concentration of factory workers, a place whichdeveloped enduring and evolving forms of class action. Yet the fact thatthis process is at one level both familiar and apparently predictable maylead us to see class movements as a direct consequence of certain kindsof economic organisation. This chapter will try to challenge this sense ofinevitability for two reasons. First, we need to understand the politicalwork that goes into constructing a class movement, work which has toovercome many kinds of internal division and can lead to a variety ofpolitical forms. Secondly, the features which lead us to take for grantedclass mobilisation in places like Sesto – towns, factories, wage-labourers– are missing in the other movements we shall be looking at, so clearlywe need to widen our perspective on what is happening in order todevelop comparisons.

This chapter explores these issues through the discussion of the dualthemes of movement and identity. The first part is concerned primarilywith the organisation of factory workers, who came from very differentsocial backgrounds and were internally divided by their conditions ofemployment. Factories had the potential to create solidarity orcompetition amongst employees, and if solidarity eventually triumphedit owed much, as we shall see, to organisations created outside theworkplace. The second theme is identity, and specifically what madesomebody a member of the working class. In this environment artisansand the new ‘unskilled’ labourers had very different attitudes andexperiences of work relations. The narrative of class identity which cameto dominate was woven out of a variety of conceptions, and went beyondsimply delimiting those who shared economic interests. It constituted apowerful account of history and morality, heavily oriented towards thefuture and with the concept of revolution at its heart.

FACTORIES AND LABOURERS

Assembling a labour force was a constant preoccupation of the earlyentrepreneurs and managers. A town which doubles its workforce everydecade or two is a town of migrants, and this implies, in a country asrecently and partially unified as Italy, the presence of considerable socialand cultural diversity. The farmers and silk workers of the old town werejoined by skilled metalworkers recruited from the centre of Milan, from

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the Alps and from other centres in Lombardy, as manufacturing was con-centrated in the Milanese periphery. Prior to 1914, many came fromoutside Lombardy, from Tuscany and the Romagna, while later in thecentury the main influx was from southern Italy. They came from ruraland urban environments, speaking a range of mutually unintelligibledialects (Bell 1986: 20), and from regions with very diverse religious andpolitical cultures. For all the migrants, whatever their linguistic andreligious backgrounds, the move to factory employment represented acultural as well as an economic transformation of their lives.

The workforce was marked by a strong gender segregation andhierarchy. Willson’s study of women workers at the large MagnetiMarelli plant during fascism shows that it was extremely rare for menand women to be employed in the same workshop, and that there wasvery little direct competition between them for jobs. This pattern wasalready apparent in the formative years prior to 1920. In a factory likeMarelli, with a great deal of assembly work, women accounted for nearlyhalf of the workforce (Willson 1993: 103), whereas they were virtuallyabsent from the heavy engineering plants. They very rarely formed partof the craft leagues; they were employed in those sectors of productionwhich did not require great physical strength, long training or education.As in so many other situations, women were seen as suited to jobs whichwere repetitive and boring, but which required considerable stamina anddexterity. They were paid wages which were only a half or a third of thosepaid to men (Willson 1993: 98), even though there was a considerablenumber of female-headed households. The information available onhousehold budgets, and on the effects of grading work by gender in termsof wage costs and social relations, is very limited for the earlier period.

The most important source of variation amongst the factory labourforce is the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers, adistinction which itself is partly articulated within a gender discourse.The categories ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ are obviously problematic. Thedistinction is found within workers’ associations and in managementpractice, and as industry expands it is managers who decide what doesand does not constitute a skill, and how it should be remunerated. Despitethe problematic character of the terms, I shall use them as a shorthandfor a distinction which is central in the following analysis, not least inthe difficult questions about the construction of class identity.

There were two main categories of people recruited to the factories ofSesto. First were skilled men, who had been through an apprenticeshipand craft training: as metalworkers, printers or masons. Historicallythese skilled workers had been independent artisans, selling not theirlabour but the product of their labour, setting their own work rhythms


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and providing their own guarantees as to the quality of their goods. Forthis category of worker, wage-labour employment was sufficiently recentand uneven to generate areas of friction in the factory. According to Bell,entrepreneurs showed greater interest in training skilled operatives fromurban workshops than in recruiting the unskilled of the city andsurrounding countryside. By 1911, 58 per cent of Sesto’s workers werefrom skilled backgrounds. There was less direct recruitment of ruralworkers in Sesto than in other industrialising areas, and although‘peasants’ of course had many skills and their own work culture, thesewere largely irrelevant to the needs of industry.

Whatever their origins, the workers had to be inducted into a newproduction system, with new machinery and labour processes. Old skills,hierarchies and work teams were broken up, while new mechanisms forsupervising and accelerating work rhythms were instituted: ‘To build astandardised labor force industrialists adopted a detailed set of factoryregulations which aimed at undermining the craft mentality of skilledartisans and at conditioning unskilled personnel to modern manufacture’(Bell 1986: 23). These factory codes regulated hours of work, forms ofdress and behaviour, responsibilities and management structures.Management was constructed around a new hierarchy of engineers andforemen, replacing the collective workshop teams characteristic ofartisanal production.

This was a period of rapid innovation. Pirelli and Breda, after sendingcommissions to the US, were pioneers in introducing assembly-linetechniques into Italy. Rationalisation meant the breaking-up of oldproduction techniques into component operations and then re-assembling the product; new forms of knowledge and skill were requiredof the workforce, old ones made redundant. Much research went intoorganising the labour force to optimise the productive capacity ofmachinery: the classic time-and-motion studies with a stop-watch toestablish the baseline for work rhythms. In The Clockwork Factory,Willson suggests that Marelli was the firm most committed to the intro-duction of Taylorism, and one of the striking facts to emerge from thestudy is the astonishing number of white-collar clerical workers that full-blown Taylorist management required – by 1942, 20 per cent of Marelliemployees were clerks. Piecework was the most widely used system ofwage-labour remuneration in Sesto factories. It was judged the best wayto achieve work discipline and maximise production. It both requiredand constituted the motivations necessary for the new production systemto run competitively.

All these developments outlined for Sesto – the disintegration andreconstitution of labour processes, the fragmentation and control of the


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labour force – are familiar from other accounts of early industrialisationand complicate any argument suggesting that class solidarity isgenerated by the simple facts of economic organisation. Althoughworkers increasingly shared similar conditions of employment, thereremained substantial obstacles to unity and mobilisation amongst thisemerging industrial proletariat. The cultural and political diversity of theworkforce was compounded by the distinctions in the factory: betweenmen and women, between clerical, skilled and unskilled workers. Theywere divided between different companies, each with its own regulations,emerging corporate cultures and policies on housing, welfare andrecreation. Within the factories there were often strongly demarcatedterritorial and social divisions between the various plants, while the noiselevels – especially in the engineering sector – made any form of verbalcommunication impossible. (There were complaints to the mayor thatthe new Falck steam hammers were shaking the whole neighbourhood– Bell 1986: 233.)

Common conditions of employment may create competition, and bedeeply divisive, impacting in different ways on workers from differentbackgrounds:

Skilled workers especially objected to piecework, perceiving it as a derogation oftheir tradition. Craft training, however, was of little use in resisting such alteredwork-loads, and craft-based organizations produced little labor solidarity… Less-skilled workers, by comparison, often welcomed piecework as a means ofincreasing income, an attitude which led to conflict between various labourcategories. ‘This system generalizes hatred among workers’, wrote SestoLavoratrice (a local journal) in 1911, when a number of Marelli lathemencomplained of antagonisms over piecework between skilled and unskilledworkers. ‘Piecework’, the journal concluded, ‘is an extremely widespread practiceand a hateful means of exploitation.’ (Bell 1986: 31)

The managers’ right to manage was unchecked by any established needto consult or negotiate with workers’ representatives, or any substantialforms of state regulation. Breaches of factory rules led to fines,threatening forms of disobedience to dismissal. Work rates wereincreased and lines speeded up, while major re-structuring was normallyaccompanied (then as now) by mass lay-offs and the re-hiring of labourunder new terms and conditions.

Neither solidarity nor competition are conferred by the facts ofeconomic organisation alone; solidarity also has to be constructed as apolitical project, on the basis of a particular understanding and vision,in the face of very real divisions and opposition. It took longer toconstruct than the houses and the chimneys; it was the political work ofdecades. There were only a dozen strikes in the first 15 years of the


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century in Sesto; they all appear to have been about job control and workroutines, and to have involved only part of the workforce in any onefactory. Effective unionisation was slow, while political unity was evenslower and more fragile. Only in 1920 did a socialist slate of candidateswin control of the Sesto municipality, to be undermined shortlyafterwards by the schism which led to the foundation of the ItalianCommunist Party in 1921.

CREATING A CLASS MOVEMENT

Bell’s study of Sesto San Giovanni in the early years of the century is acontribution to a debate in labour history about militancy in the earlystages of industrialisation. Bell argues that working-class formation owesmore to the actions of craft workers in defence of their trade than to thedemands of new masses of unskilled workers, not least because the latterwere so fragmented by the factory system. In the process he shiftsattention away from the shop-floor issues of pay and conditions, towardsthe analysis of pre-existing political and cultural traditions amongstartisans, and to political action outside the factory. In this respect thereis evidence that Turin and Milan, for example, may have followed ratherdifferent economic and political trajectories. However, I am moreconcerned with the co-existence of different kinds of mobilisation thanwith the debate about their primacy or relative weight in any oneenvironment.

The characteristic form of artisan organisation was a mutual aidsociety. These developed rapidly in Italy after unification, and by 1894there were over 6,700 such associations nationally, with a totalmembership of nearly one million. The Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di SestoSan Giovanni, founded in 1880, had several functions:

to assist injured members, to provide pensions, to pay funeral expenses and toprovide for the education of members and their children … it initiated an eveningschool [which] eventually provided Sesto factories with trained apprentices andin so doing served as a bridge between the local artisan milieu and that of theindustrial craft worker. (Bell 1986: 48)

Bell also notes that such societies were not originally founded uponconcepts of class solidarity and commitment to political change; theywere devoted to self-improvement and mutuality, and were open tomiddle-class supporters and benefactors.

However, organisations evolve with the environment in which theyoperate, and pre-war Sesto was affected by both major political eventsand booming industrialisation. The riots in Milan in 1898, when more


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than a hundred civilians were killed by the army, had led to a round-upof labour association leaders and a temporary ban on the mutual aidsocieties. This signalled increased politicisation and polarisation. Thesocieties were considered to be a challenge to the constituted authorityof the state. From then on, part of the energies of its members went intodefence of the right to organise and demonstrate, to occupy public spaces.At the same time lines of social cleavage began to shift. Middle-classmembers had little common cause with an organisation seen as actuallyor potentially subversive (unless to control it), and their presencedeclined.

In 1905 the mutual aid society gave birth to a labour organisationcalled the Circolo Avvenire, which recruited increasing numbers ofunskilled workers. The Circolo provided an organisational umbrella for ‘abuilding co-operative with 700 members … an educational associationlinked with the Popular University of Milan ... a band and choral group,a consumer’s co-operative and several irregularly appearing localjournals’ (Bell 1986: 50). The Circolo took over part of the responsibilityfor running the library, which had more than 3,000 volumes, includinga growing range of socialist texts and national and local newspapers. Itwas also a family circle since, as the local journal commented in 1920,

[t]he old-fashioned family is crumbling. Women are unable to fulfil the domesticresponsibility which previously was a basis of family life. One’s house? It hasceased to matter. One’s children? Working-class parents are unable to watchover them, nor can they assure them sustenance or an education. Both childrenand parents are made to suffer in these circumstances. (Bell 1986: 50)

To meet their needs it acted as an educational and recreationalinstitution for children.

The Circolo was the main forum for the complex and fluid party politicsof this period. The Socialist Party (PSI) had been established in 1891,partly in opposition to the largely rural, communal and anarchist organ-isations which had conducted a campaign of ‘spontaneous’ violent actionagainst the Italian state since its formation in 1860. The PSI itself had a‘maximum programme’ which embraced the full socialisation of themeans of production and exchange. But if this was the end, there wasconsiderable disagreement about the means to achieve it – not least overthe role of parliamentary democracy. The leaders who made the mostradical noises about long-term objectives often advocated the mostreformist short-term policies. If there were striking divergences withinthe Socialist Party (and within anarchism), there were often conver-gences between activists from different political cultures overrevolutionary goals and strategies. Gramsci himself worked with


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anarcho-syndicalists (whose national union swelled to 800,000members in 1920) in the factory councils, before becoming convincedof the need for a new kind of revolutionary party.

One crucial factor affecting the ideology and practice of the SocialistParty was the increasingly active role of the church, which was buildinga coalition which extended from the professional middle class through topeasants, artisans and sections of the new factory labour force. Some ofthe most salient features of the Socialist Party in Sesto and nationally – itsanti-clericalism and its symbolic life – derived from the increasingly bitterhostility to the political activity of the church. There were other politicalforces in Italian society, but the long-term trend was towards polarisa-tion, and the various coalitions which emerged – whether led by liberals,Catholics or fascists – were dominated by an anti-socialist strategy.

The management practices which had so weakened the position of theskilled workers, and flattened out the terms of employment, had also laidthe basis for new and more extensive forms of organisation in theworkplace. Craft unions gave way to those based on an industry, and inSesto the metalworkers union (FIOM) doubled its membership between1919 and 1920, to cover virtually the entire workforce in the industry.Historians debate the precise sequence and relative predominance ofdifferent forms of action in the ‘Red Years’; however the evidencesuggests that, at Sesto at least, it started as standard union action forhigher wages in the period of post-war inflation. The employersresponded to the demands with extraordinary intransigence. In August1920, the employers’ negotiator expressed this robust line on the futureof negotiations, telling the union chiefs, ‘All discussion is useless. Theindustrialists will not grant any increase at all. Since the end of the war,they have done nothing but drop their pants. We’ve had enough. Nowwe’re going to start in on you’ (Bell 1986: 110).

The employers prepared for a lock-out. On hearing of plans to close thesteel works, the workers occupied the Sesto factories, and the politicalagenda widened. Red flags flew from the chimneys; red guards armedwith rifles and grenades patrolled the perimeter; townspeople kept theoccupiers stocked with food. Factory councils emerged in the summer of1920 and attempts were made to maintain some level of industrialproduction. The issue went beyond whether metalworkers could do theirjobs unsupervised, to whether workers could run factories and police thestreets. Political relations amongst the workers were not alwaysfraternal. Earlier in the year, when the Turin workers had staged a largeand unsuccessful factory occupation, the Milan edition of the socialistnewspaper Avanti had even refused to print appeals from the Turinstrikers (Bell 1986: 109). Milan (though not perhaps Sesto itself) was


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seen as a stronghold of the reformist wing of the Socialist Party,dominated by craft unions.

In September 1920 the government finally stepped in and forced there-opening of negotiations between employers and unions, which led toa settlement on wage demands and a promise of parliamentary action toenable worker participation in industry. For the left the decision on theway forward rested on an extraordinarily complex assessment of thepower and resources available to each side. If an insurrectionary strategywas adopted, would the various factions of the left stay together, and hadenough political work been done to co-ordinate the struggle, above allbetween the towns and the many radicalised movements in thecountryside? How much military force was the government prepared touse, and would the army itself maintain discipline or fragment? Themilitary balance in turn depended on the degree of co-ordination: it wasagreed that even the Turin workers, who were the most disciplined andwell-armed, would succumb quickly to the army unless action wasgeneral and well co-ordinated. You cannot half make an insurrection,or try it out in one city; this was a point of no return. Throughout muchof Europe the left was facing the same strategic decision, and this wascertainly one of the most dramatic moments in Italian history.

There has been continuous debate about the political possibilities ofthe ‘Red Years’ in Italy, and it starts with the question about how sucha strategic decision should be made. Gramsci himself did not think thatit could be reached through consultation and representative assemblies;it was like war (Levy 1999: 199). In these rare moments of polarisationand uncertainty, the balance of force can shift very quickly: a crediblestrategy can become suicidal if its opponents have a week to prepare aresponse. Timing and anticipation are crucial. The Socialist Party metand debated a motion which effectively would have informed thegovernment of the date of the revolution. As a result of the vote, therevolution was adjourned. The majority stepped back, and relinquishedtheir control of the streets and the factories. The wage agreement washailed as a victory; the factory councils were a learning experience anda re-affirmation of their right to control the workplace, a step on the roadto permanent control. A minority, convinced that this had been a revo-lutionary moment, undone by the lack of preparation and the reformistcharacter of the Socialist Party, joined Gramsci in the split which led tothe foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in January 1921.

The industrialists had fewer doubts than the left about what the factoryoccupations represented: they had just had their productive capitaltemporarily expropriated and been given a clear message that theirpresence was superfluous in the coming order of things. In September


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1921 Agnelli, in a moment of desperation, had offered to turn Fiat intoa workers’ co-operative. If they did not take decisive measuresimmediately, they would lose everything, either through a strengthen-ing of insurrectionary forces or through erosion by parliamentary-backedmeasures. Throughout the autumn of 1920, money and resourcesflowed into the fascist organisations, both from the agrarian landlordswho had temporarily lost control of their estates, and from those indus-trialists who had lost faith in democratic solutions to their problems.Within two years, all the workers’ organisations at factory and streetlevel were demolished; within five years democracy was dismantled.

CLASS IDENTITY

I now want to step back from this rather dramatic series of events in theyears 1900–20, and focus on the formation of political identity. Even by1914 we seem to be in the presence of a fully-fledged class movement,representing the proletariat in a polarising economic and politicallandscape. We have a local organisation which united various categoriesof workers, and was affiliated and responsive to national political asso-ciations and parties. Increasingly the actions of the association wereco-ordinated and directed by national policy; in the case of the SocialistParty, that of the maximum or ultimate programme. But there is also aparadox. In 1914 the movement had been constructed outside thefactories – a set of associations concerned with self-help, education,welfare, consumption and cultural resources. Political solidarity emergedamongst groups of people who continued to experience considerable frag-mentation in the workplace. But although at one level all this makesgood practical sense, it says nothing about what people do share in theworkplace. With this, we move into the core area of working-classidentity and interests.

In order to explore this further we need to look more closely at ideasand practices of work, morality and the person. This is a large field andpatchily documented; we can easily note dates and variations, butfinding a path through it is difficult. I shall take some shortcuts, re-assembling scattered sentences and comments from the historical studiesof Sesto San Giovanni and combine them with insights from othersources, including Passerini’s very dense analysis based on the oralhistory of the Turin working class under fascism, and studies of Britishlabour history.

We can find two main conceptions of the relationship between workand the person; two poles which co-exist for long periods, which appear


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to cross over, and in so doing create a tension at the heart of working-class identity and politics.

The first conception was characteristic of skilled workers, and wasanchored around the concept of mestiere, which may be partiallytranslated as ‘craft’ or ‘trade’. Men acquired a mestiere through a longapprenticeship, and through acquiring the tools of their trade. It involved‘a moral code based on independence, respect and mutual support’ (Bell1986: 44). The dual and contrasting themes of independence andmutuality are important. Mutuality has been touched on already, andderives in part from the need for corporations – organisations whichreproduce and control the acquisition of the skills and knowledge whichconstitute a craft, and hence also from the equality of those who havesuccessfully done so. Equality of status between craftsmen rested on arecognition of hierarchy in the workplace (between the skilled and theunskilled). Independence is multi-stranded; prior to factory employmentit meant that there was nobody else in the system who told craftsmenwhere, when and how to do their job. The craftsmen set their own workrhythm: the technology rarely required them to adapt to the speed of amachine. They also decided how many hours in the day and days in theweek they worked. The craftsmen were obviously also responsible for thequality of the work they delivered: it was intrinsic to the whole practiceof a mestiere.

An indication of the qualities of a mestiere comes from the autobiog-raphy of Rinaldo Rigola, himself an artisan and later leader of theConfederazione Generale del Lavoro:

This cult of the mestiere in which the older generation believed has always movedme to reflection. The mestiere was in fact an extremely important thing, and thehigh regard in which it was held is explained by the nature of the precapitalist (thatis, pre-factory) society. The mestiere was itself a kind of capital; a capital that couldbe lost and dissipated just like any other, but it was less exposed to such risk thanlanded or mobile capital. Bankers did not exist who could take it from the possessor.In the mestiere there resided both life and independence. (Bell 1986: 240)

Those with a mestiere are defined by their work, and define themselvesas a person in their work. A whole series of notions about the person andmorality are intrinsic to the practice of the trade: skill, honesty, reliability,respect, independence. The work of a craftsman has quality, in the sensethat the work done – the product – is a manifestation of the attributes ofthe person who produces it. By the time of the industrial boom of the earlytwentieth century, most would have been familiar with wage-labouremployment, paid on time rates or on piecework. As we have seen,managers were keen to recruit these craftsmen into the factories; they


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wanted their skills, but not the rest of the work ethic of independence. Infact there could not be a stronger contrast between the artisanal workethic and that of Taylorism.

The craftsmen found themselves employed alongside the other maincategory of workers – the manovali. These were ‘the hands’ (le mani), andmanovalenza became the collective term for a labour force. Manovali werehired not for their trade or ‘quality’, but for their unspecific and undif-ferentiated working capacity; what mattered was their numbers. Theywere the masses. They were hired at the factory gate, often simply on thebasis of their physical size. The distinction between skilled and unskilled,which we have used as a shorthand, does not convey the distinctionbetween somebody who had a mestiere and someone who was amanovale. The distinction was not essentially one of greater ability, orcapacity to command higher wages; it was between two radicallydifferent practices and conceptions of work and the person. These twopractices clashed and combined in the formation of working-classidentity and politics in the industrial proletariat. Some of the politicalleaders – including Bordiga, the future head of the Italian CommunistParty – held that ‘The proletarian is not the producer who exercises hiscraft, but the individual distinguished from anyone who possesses theinstruments of production, and from anyone free from the need to liveby selling his own labour’ (Williams 1975: 80, 176, 183). In other wordsthose who had a mestiere, which included much of the trade-unionmembership, should be excluded from the ranks of the proletarianmovement – because they were property holders, they had the kinds ofintellectual and material capital referred to by Rigola, and thus inevitablythey had reformist aspirations. We shall return to this issue below.

We have seen that the craft workers provided the core of early politicalmobilisation in Sesto, and this gives support to the argument that earlyworking-class radicalism owes more to the defensive strategies of thosewhose lives were doomed by new technology than it does to theoppression of the new masses in the factories. Culhoun (1988), forexample, describes a work ethic amongst British craft workers in thenineteenth century very similar to the one outlined for northern Italy,and suggests that they were reactionary radicals, fighting to save anartisan tradition and community life in the face of industrial capitalism;radicalised precisely because no political concessions could save themfrom their economic fate. The same argument could be made in theItalian context, but with an important qualification. A skilledmetalworker, commuting out on a tram from the opulent commercialcentre of Milan (the first European city to be electrified) to work in thethundering steel mills of Falck, or to build railway rolling-stock at Breda,


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was not driven to political mobilisation by the hope of working in avillage smithy, shoeing horses. The defensiveness is not anti-modernity;it is about control of the work process and respect for the person.

This political strand endured even under the difficult conditions offascism. Passerini has an interview with a mechanic describing factoryconditions in the 1930s, too long to reproduce here but full of nuancesabout the practice of management and the ethics of work. Passeriniherself (1979: 93–5) comments on a number of themes in the interviewwhich revolve around the shifting balance between autonomy andhierarchy on the shop floor. Since work is associated with ability andhonesty it should be self-regulating, hence the strong objections topiecework; hierarchy should be based on merit – founded on, and limitedby, work-based competence. I want to draw attention to only one of thepoints which emerge from Passerini’s discussion. The phrase ‘it is notmy job’ runs like a leitmotif through a long section of the interview (‘It’snot my job, I’m no guard’; ‘Your job was to come and tell me’). We canhear the phrase in a number of ways, but I think Passerini is right tostress the moral component. ‘It is not my job’ can be glossed as: ‘I takeresponsibility for doing the work for which I was trained or hired; to askme to do other things is derogatory to me as a person.’ In the 1970s Iheard the same arguments and the same moral anger from an Italianmason objecting to the meddling of his employer: ‘If you do not think Iam up to the job you should not have hired me. Once you have hired me,keep your nose out of my business.’ Basically this is also the workideology of academics.

The tradition of the skilled artisan gave much of the initial impetus tothe workers’ movement, in terms of organisation, struggles arising froma distinctive work ethic, and above all a sharp understanding of thealienation of factory employment. As the movement expanded and con-solidated, across occupational categories, and in a national andinternational arena, the defining features of the workers came increas-ingly to be those of the unskilled manual labourer, precisely those whowere not heirs to the craft tradition and work ethic. This is the ‘cross-over’ and paradox I mentioned earlier. What makes somebody a worker– what is shared by ‘the masses’ – is an undifferentiated, unspecialised,impersonal labour power, bought in the marketplace and exploited in theworkplace. Marx’s analysis of capitalist production and the role of theproletariat itself feeds into the political movement and its self-definition.

Hobsbawm (1984: chapter 6) analyses one aspect of this in hisdiscussion of the iconography of working-class movements. He tracesthe way images of the worker in the period of mass industrialisationbecame increasingly masculine. On banners and posters there emerged


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an increasingly fixed repertoire of images: not a craftsman at a lathe, nota woman in a cotton mill, but a man, bare-chested, with ripplingmuscles, banging heavy metal. Of course the image evokes force, and ifits purpose is to drive fear into the heart of the bourgeoisie, it may be moreeffective than the image of a bespectacled print worker. Hobsbawmsuggests that the movement was essentially workerist: ‘For mostworkers, whatever their skill, the criterion of belonging to their class wasprecisely the performance of manual, physical labour’; and that ‘themovement wished to stress precisely its inclusive character’ (1984b:101). We should add that this ‘inclusive’ icon of the worker remains veryspecific and essentialised – not just because it is so gendered, but becausethe labour-power that workers sell is manual, that of the undifferenti-ated masses. There is no evocation of the skills and knowledge thatworkers bring to production, nor of the more personalised work ideologydocumented above. The absence of such references, though under-standable, risks collapsing class consciousness into the terms set by thedominant ideology, both in the distinction between manual and mentallabour, and in representation of the ‘economy’ and material interests.

Identities do not of course derive simply from images. I suggested inthe Introduction that identity is best understood as a complex narrative,politically constructed, defining boundaries and oppositions. Narrativesposition collectivities in social processes, in both time and space; theyare collective, the work of many minds; they may be more or less stableover time and more or less standardised in their form, depending on thesocial processes and the organisation forms (such as the CommunistParty) which shape them. They are also, in another sense, highlypersonal. The narrative of the industrial proletariat of Sesto begins, likeothers, with the new, with a disjuncture. Early political organisers in thetown – like Carlo Borromeo, a printer who had earned his livelihoodwalking or ‘tramping’ around Europe, and in the process learned a greatdeal about socialism – knew that they were living in a world of rapidlychanging possibilities. Technological developments, such as mass elec-trification, were changing the character of human labour and therhythms of life; railways and the internal combustion engine were trans-forming distance and accelerating the mixing of goods and people. Wecould say that there was space–time compression. The rapidly accumu-lating factory force represented a new social reality, created throughrupture and disaggregation, exposed to various forms of hardship anddehumanising working conditions.

Ethno-nationalist movements of the period, which often emerged inresponse to the same modernising processes, tended to create identitynarratives around historical continuity, and to create political strategies


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which dealt with present disruption through the evocation of aharmonious past. Narratives of the working class, especially in this‘unconsolidated’ period, defined who ‘we’ are in terms of who ‘we’ willbecome; they are dominated by the future tense. The point is obvious buttelling in the names and symbols of the workers’ movement: the firstpolitical organisation in Sesto was the Circolo Avvenire (‘the future’); thefirst local newspaper was Il Domani (‘tomorrow’); the first socialistnewspaper was Avanti (‘forward’). One of the most popular symbols wasthe rising sun – a new tomorrow. The sun rose increasingly in the eastafter 1917. The famous songs – ‘The Red Flag’, the Inno dei Lavoratori –which became anthems of the working-class movement, use only verbsin the future tense.

The processes which were constituting the working class as a collec-tivity were also creating the base for a new social order. With historicalhindsight we may misrepresent the timescales within which the earlyclass movement conceived of its life, assuming that the dislocation anddisjunctures of industrialisation would be followed by decades orgenerations of political growth and consolidation: only at this pointwould a revolutionary transformation become possible. But the socialworld of towns like Sesto was doubly new. Even while the industrialistswere assembling and disciplining a factory labour force, the workersdeveloped aspirations for a further transformation of production and ofsociety. The ferment of 1920 shows that this was a personal aspirationto be realised in the imminent future, or at least in the lifetimes of theworkers – not something for an unknown future generation. Passerinibrings out very clearly the tensions that this ‘doubly new’ reality createdin one crucial field: the ideology of work. How was it possible to combinethe notion that work is a moral and social duty – that a person derives hisor her identity and can realise himself or herself in the work process –with the notion that it is legitimate to strike, to destroy that which hasbeen produced, or sabotage the machinery? (Passerini 1979: 103).

The theme is discussed in relation to the theoretical contribution ofthe Ordine Nuovo group in Turin, which Passerini argues (1979: 95) didnot succeed in solving two major problems: first, how to keep the balancebetween the appeal to contemporary values and the need to overthrowthe existing order, and second, how to avoid reducing the concept ofproducer to that of professional worker, thus forgetting the needs of theincreasing masses of the unskilled. At issue here is also the concept ofalienation. There is clearly an overlap between Marxist theoreticalunderstandings of alienation (and exploitation), such as those developedby the Ordine Nuovo group, and everyday practices of workplaceresistance which emerge in the lives of skilled and unskilled workers. The


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relationship between these strands (which Gramsci himself would call‘ideology’ and ‘commonsense’) raises difficult historical questions ofevidence and interpretation.

On another point the historical evidence is more straightforward: theconcept of revolution was a central organising feature of the classnarrative. As a goal to be realised it embraced a whole range ofaspirations: the end of exploitation and of subordination, the end ofpoverty, the achievement of social justice, a moral reckoning, perhapsthe end of history. The concept of revolution was not only a goal, it wasa way of knowing where we are, a positioning concept in relation tohistory, politics and morality. It was normally combined with themetaphor of the road. There was an historicist version of ‘the road’:historical forces were moving us to the day of revolution, we could not besure where we were in terms of the distance still to be travelled; therevolution might be around the corner or further off – we could onlyscrutinise the signs. It was similar to a theory of predestination and wasembraced by the maximalist wing of the Socialist Party. For otherpolitical currents, there was agency as well as determination: the roadhad to be constructed. Leaders are those who, through their under-standing of events and the example they set, take the working class in aparticular direction. There are heroes and martyrs. There are also thosewho betray the movement: through dividing the working class at crucialhistorical junctures, or by leading them into a blind alley, or by becomingseparated from the masses. To repeat the point: the revolutionary goalprovides an historical, political and moral framework for the interpreta-tion of the lessons of history, and of present actions: Will they advance usto the revolution? When a class movement is defeated, and the roadforward is blocked, then the narrative which gives shape to an identityalso enters into crisis. In the autumn of 1920, with mounting evidenceof the failure of the factory occupations to achieve any lasting advance,there was bitterness, fragmentation and mental breakdown (for Gramscihimself, see Williams 1975: 297).

Much of this rich political culture was destroyed by fascism and had tobe recreated after 1943, in very different social and economic conditions.Some survived, in the form of workplace resistance and in anunderground political culture which Mussolini referred to, with grudgingrespect, as the generation of the indomitable (la generazione degli irre-ducibili – Passerini 1979: 96). At this point we no longer have only anarrative of making, of the new; there is also a tradition – and working-class identity in the sense of being part of a political movement is veryfrequently acquired as a cultural inheritance.


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CONCLUSION

There were many strands in the making of a working-class movementin Sesto San Giovanni. There were the craft workers, with their moralcodes based on independence and mutuality, a culture within which aperson is defined by and in his or her work. The factory system erodedthese skills and values, and the craft workers’ struggle within the factoriesconcentrated on maintaining some controls over the production process.They brought to the movement the tradition of mutual aid organisations,largely outside the factory, and a strong sense of the alienation in theworkplace which was a result of capitalist re-organisation. They werejoined by growing numbers of ‘unskilled’ workers, hired for their undif-ferentiated labour-power. Unlike the craft workers, these were men andwomen whose pre-factory experiences were portrayed as irrelevant tothe new environment; they brought to it neither skills nor values nororganisational traditions; just numbers. In terms of a working-classnarrative they were people with no past.

Many political movements developed in these industrial districts. InSesto, in the long run, a revolutionary Socialist (later Communist) Partycame to dominate. In its master narrative, a central historical role wasassigned to the proletariat. Out of all the social groups experiencingeconomic and social dislocation from capitalist growth in contemporaryItaly – artisans, domestic workers, peasants, share-croppers – only theproletariat held the key to the future. It was the proletariat, sometimesquite narrowly defined as totally propertyless wage-labourers in industry,who would make the revolution. They represented the new phenomenoncreated by capitalism, and they alone were detached from any of theeconomic or cultural forms characteristic of earlier modes of production.As a result they would also be immune to bourgeois and reformistpolitical organisations, like craft unions, co-operatives or parliamentarydemocracy. This was a highly deterministic analysis: a very direct rela-tionship was posited between social being and social consciousness. Theproletariat has an historical goal of achieving communism, and since inthis historical period it is a small minority of the workforce, it mustbecome a leading class in a hegemonic coalition of forces againstcapitalism. In the narrative the historical justification for this hegemonicposition is that ‘the whole labouring class is destined to become like thefactory proletariat’ (Gramsci, quoted in Williams 1975: 189).

The leaders of this movement created a narrative in which the revo-lutionary crisis is a total social event, and the role of the new workingclass, no less than the old artisans, is charged with moral purpose.Gramsci’s piece on the Communist Party (4 September 1920, in Williams


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1975: 259) delights in the comparison between the modern proletarianmovement and the primitive Christian community, as the heart of a newcivilisation in which there will be a new ‘order of moral life and the lifeof the sentiments’. In the present moment the sustaining and constantsentiment is solidarity; in the future, with the foundation of a newsociety, there will have to be other values,

because the enemy to combat and overcome will no longer be outside theproletariat, will no longer be an external physical power which is controllableand limited … [instead] the dialectic of the class struggle will be interiorised andwithin every consciousness, the new man, in his every act, will have to combatthe ‘bourgeois’ lying in ambush for him. (Williams 1975: 227)

This and other texts bring out the general character of the crisis and itsresolution. The economic crisis of capitalism may be Gramsci’s‘Doomsday machine’ (Williams 1975: 231), but what we also get fromGramsci is a sense that the translation of economic processes into a moraldrama is essential in generating revolutionary politics.

I cite these texts because they are available, as they were to the politicalactivists of 1920 in Sesto. It would require a very different kind ofhistorical analysis to assess how influential they were in the construc-tion of a political culture, an analysis which may now be impossible.They do indicate both the tensions and the convergences in the differentstrands of this class formation, and the links between economic relations,morality and the future tense in the forging of a class identity.

The revolutionary strand is reconstructed in the class narrative in thevery different circumstances following the collapse of fascism and thewar of liberation after 1943, and remains strong for many decades; butit slowly becomes diluted and muted. In the representation of ‘who weare’, the weight of tradition, of a highly institutionalised and sometimesvery ritualised political culture, comes to take precedence over ‘who wewill become’. The future tense is of course important in other politicalnarratives of the twentieth century, not least in those visions of nationaldestiny which had such tragic consequences for European history.However, the revolutionary aspirations of this class movement – thestruggle to achieve a fundamentally new social order without classdivisions – represent a different relationship between past, present andfuture from that imagined by nationalism. The loss of a sense that thefuture might be radically different from the present, a theme which hadbeen a central feature of working-class identity – represents also acollapse into economism. The factory system had created a workingclass which increasingly shared the same conditions of employment.The class movement had in part taken this reality, and the dominant


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representations of it, as the basis for identity and unity, constructing anunderstanding of the workers as defined by their economic position inthe production process, as undifferentiated masses selling their labour-power. But at the same time the movement had also stressed, in a varietyof formulations, that this constituted alienation and was to betranscended – and while that understanding prevailed, workers’ interestswere never defined in purely economic terms. If the future tense is lost,demands for improvement remain within the dominant discourse of howthe economy operates and of the workers’ position within it. Thedemands are material: for higher wages in order to achieve a higherstandard of living, since workers after Italy’s economic miracle positionedthemselves as much in the realms of consumption as of production. Theolder theme of alienation resurfaces outside mainstream politics, in the1969 movements of students and factory workers which shook the northItalian cities. The old questions of work and identity were re-opened froma variety of perspectives, at a time when the labour movement appearedlocked into corporatist and reformist policies. It was at this time that the50-year-old writings on the factory councils were republished and brieflyregained some resonance.

SOURCES

The first study of a class movement had to deal with a classic urbanindustrial workforce, and the first third of this chapter draws on DonaldBell’s fascinating study of Sesto San Giovanni (1986), a town which hasmythic status on the Italian left. The rest of the chapter moves out fromthat in various directions. We have a second English-language study ofSesto, though it concentrates on the fascist period: Willson’s (1993)book on the Marelli factory, which pioneered Taylorism. It raises generalquestions about solidarity and competition in the workplace, and is par-ticularly valuable for its account of women’s experience. There aremany other studies of industrial conditions in northern Italy between1900 and 1920, but we need also to note variations: Sesto, Milan itself,and Turin diverge both because of sociological factors (whetherlabourers are recruited from the countryside or from artisan workshops;the length of their residence in the city) and in terms of political cultures(reformist, revolutionary, anarchist). Gribaudi (1987) takes a differentapproach to class identity from that of this chapter, but is particularlyvaluable for the wealth of data on social life in the working-class neigh-bourhoods in Turin, and on the economic and geographical movementof families over generations.


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The study of Sesto raises questions about the relationship between thepolitical culture of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers in the labourmovement. This is an important theme in British social history, and canbe followed up through the work of E. P. Thompson (1963) andsubsequent commentaries (Kaye and McClelland 1990) or the work ofE. J. Hobsbawm (1984b).

The political events of the Red Years in Italy (1919–21) have beenanalysed very extensively. A large proportion of the studies focus onTurin, because it had the most radical workers’ movement, was thesetting for the work of Gramsci and the factory council movement, andbecause a large number of the historians concerned with this period wereinvolved with the Italian Communist Party. There are many English-language sources, including Clark (1977), Davidson (1982) and Spriano(1975), while more recently Levy (1999) has reconstructed theimportant but neglected role of anarchists in the political events of theperiod. Williams (1975) is a wonderful source, partly because it containsas much as anyone needs to know about the complex, interweavingcurrents and strategic debates on the Italian left in this period. Above allit brings together the national unfolding of political forces and detailedobservations on the day-to-day actions of key players, struggling to readthe future in a moment when the stakes were tragically high – it reads inplaces like a political thriller.

Passerini (1979; 1987) is extremely valuable for anybody interestedin research using oral history, and I have drawn on her insights intowork ethics and class identity in this context. Her contributions gobeyond the scope of this chapter, although I shall be returning to someof the issues on identity later. Finally Lumley (1990) is an excellent guideto the political culture of a much later period (1968–78, and especiallyin Milan). One strand in this richly documented study is the return ofrevolutionary politics, and although the composition and context forthese movements were very different, they do shed light on the renewedinterest in the political experiments and aspirations of 1919–21.


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3 ANDALUSIA: EVERYONE OR NO ONE

Anarchist leaders in the nineteenth century produced a handful of classictexts, and there are splendid monographs on anarchist politics in variousEuropean regions, but there is no body of theoretical work to compare toMarxism, and far fewer scholars keeping alive an understanding of thecharacteristics, potentialities and limitations of anarchist politics. Marxhimself, and then the communist movement, was locked into a bitterstruggle with anarchism from the 1860s, and the rivalry led on occasionsto the destruction of anarchist movements – as argued by Chomsky 1969– and a general tendency to occlude or minimise its presence. Such factorsare aggravated by features intrinsic to anarchism itself. The refusal toform political parties and contest elections makes it difficult to estimatesupport, while the movement had a loose and largely unbureaucratisedcharacter, which frequently caused it to disappear from public view.When the state dissolves the syndicates and centres, and there are nostrikes or marches to disturb the policeman’s watch, has the beast itselfdisappeared? The work of anthropologists and social historians oneveryday forms of resistance has provided a better framework for openingup questions about continuity and discontinuity in political action.

‘Before 1914 anarchism had been far more of a driving ideology of rev-olutionary activists than Marxism over large parts of the world’(Hobsbawm 1994: 74), but its influence declined dramatically in thesecond half of the twentieth century. This long-term decline hasfrequently been interpreted as a function of broader historical stages:either anarchism itself is generated in societies at an early stage ofdevelopment, or it represents an early form of politics. Now thatanarchism no longer has a monopoly on ‘historical failure’, this may bea good time to assess its characteristics, including those complexjudgements about its primitive or pre-modern features.

Within Europe, the various currents of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were strongest in Spain. Anarchism became a major politicalforce in the 1870s, both amongst rural workers in Andalusia and in theurban industrial centres of Catalonia – a fact which immediately casts

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doubt on any simple correlation between anarchism and ‘development’.Its fortunes over the next 70 years fluctuated dramatically, a consequencenot of the dynamics of a millenarian religion, but of the extent of staterepression. There were periods of heightened activism between 1903–05– halted by famine; and in the ‘Bolshevik’ years 1918–20 – ended bymilitary intervention. Insurrectionary activity resumed in the 1930s,including an uprising at Casa Viejas in Andalusia in 1933, which wasput down by a notorious army massacre. It was followed by the Civil Warof 1936–39, when the Andalusian anarchists, as part of the Republicanalliance, were quickly overrun by Franco’s troops moving in from NorthAfrica. Over this 70-year period the movement changed substantially,and was continually challenged by a substantial socialist movement; asin Turin or Milan, there was both rivalry and a crossing over betweenanarchism and other left-wing currents.

There are substantial historical and ethnographic monographs,available in English, which analyse the dynamics of anarchism and itsposition within a wider Spanish political history. Although theseconstitute my source material, this chapter does not attempt a synthesisof the findings or the debates. Instead it is a study which reads thesesources ‘against the grain’ to explore and to elaborate themes whichemerged in the previous chapter, so that a wider picture of classmovements may be built up: questions of work, identity, political organ-isation, revolution and moral codes. The chapter starts with a generaloverview of anarchism in Spain, but then goes on to concentrate on onesocial environment: the great estates in Andalusia. There are foursections. The chapter begins with the revolutionary narrative so thatreaders gain an impression of the drama of the struggle. This is followedby an account of the organisation of the estates, and then two sectionson political action: workplace resistance and revolutionary mobilisation.

ANARCHISM IN SPAIN

A first encounter with almost any of the classic studies of Andalusiananarchism leaves two strong impressions. The first is the level of violencethat the Spanish state routinely employed to nullify attempts by thelabouring population to improve their conditions. Anarchists also usedviolence. The more conspiratorial strands within the movement at theend of the nineteenth century used assassination as a strategy todestabilise the state, and anarchists killed large numbers of theiropponents after their short-lived victory in 1936. This happened in acontext where the state employed a branch of the army – the civil guard– as a disciplined and autonomous ‘occupying’ force in every town;

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where union and political organisations were regularly banned; wheremass arrests and torture of suspected activists were common: militarycolumns were sent out to deal with larger-scale disturbances,culminating in a civil war in which one in ten of the population ofAndalusia was killed in reprisals after the fighting had ceased.Throughout the Franco regime, and into the 1970s, Spain was the mostpoliced nation in Europe (Foweraker 1989: 182). It sometimes seemsextraordinary that anybody raised their head, given the high price paidfor activism.

The second aspect which surfaces repeatedly in the studies is theprofound immobility of these social forces. It is hard to think of otherregions of Europe where there was so desperately little cumulativechange over a 100-year period (roughly 1850–1950) in terms ofincreases in living standards – let alone the redistribution of property orthe acquisition of political rights. Mass strikes to increase wages for oneharvest, even if successful, were annulled for the next – each year thestruggle started again from scratch. After two generations of large-scalemobilisation, in 1905 Andalusia suffered what is generally described asthe last major famine in western Europe, with no serious attempt bylandlords or the government to alleviate misery:

In the country districts, in spite of all the strikes and insurrections … [anarchism]has achieved practically nothing. Whether agriculture was booming orslumping, the standard of living of the agricultural labourers in the south of Spainremained practically the same from 1870 to 1936. (Brenan 1960: 157)

Things got worse in the ‘hungry years’ of the 1940s (Fraser 1973: 71ff.).After Franco’s victory, a pueblo mayor summarised the view of the elite:‘Since we won the war, you [the labourers] have no longer any rights,only duties’ (Gilmore 1980: 136). For a long period, until quite late inthe twentieth century, this was not an environment which encouragedfaith in the unfolding of material forces leading to progress, or agradualist approach to social transformation. Over this period there were,of course, changes in political culture and political strategy; neverthe-less the temper of anarchist politics is shaped by an enduring concernwith morality and justice, and by the bleak alternatives of stasis or theuncertainties of revolutionary violence.

The beginning of Spanish anarchism is attributed to the work of theItalian engineer Giuseppe Fanelli, sent by Bakunin to Spain in 1868.Brenan describes the result in the following terms:

Within the space of less than three months, without knowing a word of Spanishor meeting more than an occasional Spaniard who understood his French orItalian, he had launched a movement that was to endure, with wave-like


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advances and recessions, for the next seventy years and to affect profoundly thedestinies of Spain. (Brenan 1960: 140)

The description of this visit suggests a spark applied to dry tinder, or in thewords of one local activist, ‘It is just as if someone is in a dark room andthe light is turned on’ (Mintz 1982:31). Of course such dramatic resultswere only possible because there was considerable convergence betweenexisting political aspirations and those of the International Brotherhood.

The anarchist proselytisers developed ‘The Idea’: that human beingsmust be free; that all authoritarian relations should be abolished,especially those of the church and the state; that liberty will be achievedthrough revolutionary acts which destroy those relationships, not byseizing control of the state or trying to reform it. The movement whichworks to achieve liberty (and here the contrast with communist politicalpractice is most evident) must not recreate the authoritarian relationswhich it seeks to destroy; participation, whether individually or in localcollectivities, must be voluntary and spontaneous. The Idea arrived in asociety where the church was strongly identified with the rich, andwhere, since the liberal land reforms, there had been an increase in ruraluprisings against the landlords and the local agencies of the state.

Although most of the message was not new, there was tremendousrespect for the form it took. Literacy was highly valued as the key tounderstanding The Idea, and literacy programmes spread rapidly(Kaplan 1977: 88; Mintz 1982: 85). By 1918 more than 50 towns inAndalusia had libertarian newspapers (Brenan 1960: 179). Learningraised consciousness, and those with the greatest understanding andcommitment were ‘the men with ideas’ – the obreros conscientes –amongst whom the artisans of the pueblo were strongly represented.Literacy served not just the diffusion of political ideas, but also theacquisition of scientific knowledge, since it was a tenet of anarchistthought that human beings could learn much about themselves and thefoundations of society from the study of nature. Science was also seen asa weapon against Catholic superstition. In the larger centres like Jerez,mass secular education, anti-clericalism and women’s emancipationwere central components of anarchist popular culture from the 1870s(Kaplan 1977, chapter 3), issues which would still be considered radicalnearly a century later.

By the end of the First World War – after many unsuccessful revolts,organisational experiments and congressional debates, interspersed withperiods of state repression – the dominant political current in Andalusiawas anarcho-syndicalism. The sindicato (or centro) was the mainorganising institution – it united all those union members who workedin a particular locality. It was a flexible organisation which united people


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in the workplace, and also more widely in the city or pueblo, drawing inartisans, women and the seasonally unemployed. It was a compromisebetween the two currents which Kaplan identifies so clearly in thepolitical developments of an earlier generation in Jerez: the unionisedworkplace which mobilised through strike action, and the communityof the poor mobilised through local insurrection. For the sindicato themain political weapon was the general strike, which brought togetherthe employed and the unemployed – even the shopkeepers and theservants – in a short, complete stoppage. Witnesses to these sudden andtotal events suggest that different actors may have had different under-standings and expectations of them – for some they were a workplacestruggle over pay and conditions; for others a revolutionary insurrection.

The syndicates were linked in a loose regional and national federation,the CNT, but this organisation had no full-time employees, no union feesand could pay no strike funds; nor could the federation impose a co-ordinated political strategy. The syndicates of each pueblo and citydecided voluntarily whether to participate in a campaign. These practiceswere both a necessity (workers were simply too poor to pay union duesor sustain a long strike campaign) and an intrinsic feature of anarchistideology. The absence of the kind of centralised command structuredeveloped by the Communist Party made it a very different kind ofpolitical movement. It was not based on a theoretical understanding ofthe historical role of the proletariat, but was open to all those disadvan-taged by capitalist development, including artisans and the seasonallyunemployed. It also had an open democratic texture, as is revealed inaccounts of the Sunday assemblies to debate local affairs (Brenan 1960:151) – hence there were fewer tensions between the rank-and-file andthe leadership, though there were tensions between advocates ofreformist and revolutionary practices. The comparative absence of formalorganisation was also a survival strategy against recurrent oppression:when the state relaxes its grip, the capacity to mobilise emerges veryquickly, whereas a political party needs to select and train its cadres inorder to re-establish a command structure. (Lenin said that it took 10 to15 years to develop a leader, and one day to lose one.)

TAKING AN AXE TO THE ROOTS: MORALITY, REVOLUTION ANDTHE FUTURE TENSE

The revolutionary strategies developed by a proletarian vanguard partyrequired a high degree of centralised co-ordination, as well as a strategicsense of the most effective ways to paralyse a complex, interdependenteconomic system and triumph over the coercive powers of the state. The


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general strike, as it developed in Andalusia, was appropriate to a morehomogeneous society of estates and pueblos, and aimed to forge a kind of‘mechanical solidarity’ between them. During the strike each pueblowould be sealed off – preventing entry of outsiders, whether strike-breakers or the police – and then shut down, in an attempt to constructa common purpose amongst different occupational groupings. Thetheory behind it was enunciated in a document by the anarchistfederation, the CNT, in 1910:

Given a general strike, if all the workers fold their arms at a given moment, thiswill result in such a substantial upheaval in the history of the present society ofexploiters and exploited, that it will inevitably cause an explosion, a clashbetween antagonistic forces that are struggling today for their survival; [just] asEarth, if it stopped rotating on its own axis, would then crash into some othercelestial body. (Mintz 1982: 25)

One of Mintz’s informants, reconstructing the dynamics of the uprisingand massacre at Casa Viejas in 1933, had absorbed this understanding:

It is very easy to transform the world. You abolish classes and change the socialorder. I forget who said it, but it’s been said that when all the workers cross theirarms and stop working, capitalism will be at an end. What is difficult is to haveall the workers cross their arms at the same time – to agree to do it at the sametime. The transformation itself is simple. When the workers are in accord, theycan change the world at once. (Mintz 1982: 25–6)

One important strand of the revolutionary narrative, and of revolu-tionary practice in the uprisings and the Civil War, is fuelled by aparticular moral vision which relates less to the economic crises of acapitalist system than to the evils of an authoritarian and competitivesociety. The moral urgency can be heard in other sources. Ascaso wasan anarchist leader who sent this farewell message to his comrades,before deportation to West Africa for his part in the Catalan uprising of1932: ‘Poor bourgeoisie that needs to resort to these means in order tosurvive. It should not surprise us … no one dies without showing theirclaws … Something is breaking down and dying. Its death is our life, ourliberation’ (Mintz 1982: 144).

A moral purpose, based on a view that there have been centuries ofinjustice, may give rise to a revolutionary narrative that is detached fromany view of maturing economic processes, of progress, or a sense thatthere are material or spiritual achievements in the bourgeois worldwhich can be carried forward. As a result, in this strand, revolution isassociated with destruction, and now is as good a time as any other tomake it happen. Back in 1891, 4,000 labourers had marched in Jerezchanting, ‘We cannot wait another day – long live Anarchy’ (Brenan


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1960: 162). Obviously nobody had told them that Andalusians weresupposed to prefer mañana. The most famous and apocalyptic version ofthis understanding comes from an anarchist standing with Brenan,watching Malaga burn: ‘Yes, they are burning it down. And I tell you –not one stone will be left on another stone – no, not a plant nor even acabbage will grow there, so that there may be no more wickedness in theworld’ (Brenan 1960: 189).

This is, of course, not the only strand in anarchism, and if the first stageof revolution was perceived as simple, the second task, that of building,was more complex. José Monroy, another leader of the Casa Viejasuprising, remarked:

We thought that a general strike would triumph. We wanted to live withoutmoney, by the interchange of goods. Then it would be another battle. One had toform the organization and then arrange a system for the different organizationsto co-operate with each other. (Mintz 1982: 26)

The conviction that money is the root of all evil, and that a futurelibertarian society would dispense with it, was another enduring strandamongst the obreros conscientes. The morality of the post-revolutionarysociety would be built on sharing, this being in part the projectionforward of the values and practices of everyday life amongst field-labourers such as Pepe Pareja: ‘If a child has two pieces of bread, he mustbe told to put one down and not hold one in each hand. That is egoismo’(Mintz 1982: 83). These values were carried into adulthood in the fields,where 20 or 30 men stood in a circle and ate gazpacho from one largebowl set on the ground. Another man observed, ‘In the campo there isone bowl for everyone. If for each spoon you take, he takes three – heeats more bread – it is egoismo’ (Mintz 1982: 83). The vision of a futuresociety only becomes comprehensible when located in the moral map ofthe present, with its divisions between rich and poor, or betweensolidarity (unión) and selfishness (egoismo).

There was also a growing awareness that spontaneity had generateda series of defeats; that these had a very high human cost; and thatexperience, leadership and co-ordination were necessary. Here are twoother eloquent verdicts on the 1933 Casa Viejas uprising from villageactivists who participated in it:

We thought that making the revolution was easy. We were young. We were stillwalking on all fours like a child. We did not have the capacity for revolution. Wewere ignorant. But in spite of this, we were like caged birds who have no othermission in life than to see if the master will leave the cage-door open. (ManuelLlamas, quoted in Mintz 1982: 265)


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Since this town was aroused to revolutionary fervour, it can be said that thevillagers believed that everyone else was also alerted. And that being the case,the government could not repress the entire nation. For if an alert like this hadtaken place throughout the whole country, what would have happened? Theforces stationed in each town would not have been enough to suppress a generalmovement. Don’t you think so? That is what happened here. And this little cornerof the world remained with its belief. And here there was a massacre. (PepePareja, quoted in Mintz 1982: 265)

THE LATIFUNDIA

We can now go back to examine the kind of society which generatedsuch dramatic political practice, and in particular the shape taken by therural conflicts. In both liberal and Marxist histories, the oppositionbetween town and country is usually an opposition between progressand backwardness, and the fact that anarchism was strong in the ruraleconomy of Andalusia feeds into the assumption that it represented aprimitive kind of politics. But the trajectory of wage-labour in agricultureis generally the reverse of that in industry: it expands rapidly in the lasthalf of the nineteenth century, and thereafter – with technologicalinnovation – declines in favour of family farming. In Andalusia, asthroughout southern Europe, the rural proletariat outnumbered theindustrial proletariat until the second half of the twentieth century, andsince it was generally a radicalised proletariat, rural areas were often astronghold of the political left.

Agriculture dominated the Andalusian economy before the advent ofmass tourism in the 1960s, but there was not a ‘rural’ population in thesense that the term would be used to describe Tuscany or the Basquecountry. Andalusia is a region of major cities and smaller nucleatedsettlements called pueblos, with a population ranging from a few hundredto tens of thousands (Corbin:1993: 32). Labourers did not live on theland; indeed those outside the pueblo were stigmatised as marginal orrootless. Instead they congregated in the pueblos with other occupationalgroupings – artisans and professionals. The pueblo is a ‘populated placeand a placed population’ (Corbin 1993: 72), and this duality is importantin understanding anarchist politics.

Outside the pueblo lay the estates or cortijos which dominatedAndalusian agriculture. Large estates, or latifundia, had been dominantin Roman times; since they are no longer found in most other parts ofEurope but are still found in Andalusia, there is a temptation to regardthis as evidence of unbroken tradition, or as an archaism. In turn, thismay suggest a determining role for geography – the presence of the largeestates being dictated by soils and climate – thus ‘naturalising’ a complex


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social system. In practice, agrarian systems depend on many factors,including technology, markets and the state. Andalusia has areas ofsuccessful small farms, while throughout history the maintenance oflarge estates has required the expenditure of considerable force.

In the dry zones the estates produced wheat and olives, with the mainlabour input from May to July, and from December to January; wagesearned during those periods had to provide an income for the whole year.Struggles over employment contracts were concentrated at harvest time,and were at their sharpest in the years of abundance. The famousperiodicity of rural conflict in Andalusia is not explained by hunger anddespair; instead, as Aya (1975) demonstrates, the bargaining power ofworkers was much weaker in the hungry years. During the rest of theyear unemployment was very high, though there was some demand forlabour in the irrigated zones of the river basins. A small group ofpermanent employees lived on the cortijo, but the main workforceconsisted of seasonal gangs of around 25 labourers, living in temporaryaccommodation on the cortijo for a few weeks at a time for the harvests.Women constituted about a third of the workforce, and were employedespecially in the harvesting of olives and cotton. Although the cortijo wasrun with wage-labour, it could not be the only framework for politicalmobilisation, since there was both a seasonal pattern of employment anda lack of stability in the composition of the work gangs.

Andalusia had one of the most polarised agrarian structures in Europe,with 1 per cent of the landowners possessing more than half of the land,mostly in estates larger than 250 hectares (Aya 1975: 18–19; Malefakis1970: 31). Of the rural population 50 to 60 per cent were landlesslabourers – close to a million people during the Franco regime – thoughthe total figure started to drop in the 1960s. However, there was no sharpdemarcation between the totally propertyless and those who ownedsmall plots of land or worked as artisans, since they were all likely to beemployed as labourers during the harvests.

Rural polarisation had been aggravated by the liberal reforms of thenineteenth century, which had sold off huge swathes of church propertyin 1836–37, sold off communal land in 1854–56, and removed restric-tions on the sale of lands held by the nobility (Kaplan 1977: 42). Therewas a massive transfer of property rights to a new group of wealthynobles and bourgeois, but not to the peasantry or to the landless.Andalusia had never been an egalitarian society, but these liberalmeasures sharply reduced the economic options for the poor: long-termtenancy arrangements were replaced by short leases, tenancies ingeneral gave way to wage-labour and communal rights disappeared. Thetaxation base for municipal governments shifted from land resources to


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consumption taxes, which hit the poor hardest (Aya 1975: 74–5).Meanwhile the population grew rapidly. Historians date the upsurge ofagrarian protest in the second half of the nineteenth century to this rapidexpansion of market relations in a rural society, and the polarisationwhich it created. There was increased poverty but, as Kaplan says (1977:10), it was the presence of wealth which generated anarchism.

WORKPLACE RESISTANCE

At the risk of some simplification it is possible to describe the characterof the Andalusian economy as constant from the consolidation of theliberal reforms through to the 1960s. My account of labour relations onthe latifundia will derive mostly from the research of Martinez-Alier inthe 1960s, which is itself supported on key points by documentaryevidence going back to the early part of the twentieth century.

The organisational problems of the latifundia are those common tolabour-intensive capitalist agriculture. Firstly, production in agricultureis seasonal. As a result, either the districts carry a population which isunemployed for a large part of the year; or the local population migratesin search of work in the dead months; or workers are recruited in fromother regions during the periods of high demand. These tensions remainuntil agriculture is ‘industrialised’, with a very much lower number oflabourers, permanently employed as machine operators – a developmentwhich triggered the definitive exodus of rural populations andtransformed the face of Europe from the 1950s onwards.

The second problem is the control of the labour process. Maintainingthe quality and quantity of work output is a problem in all systems ofwage-labour, but it is easier if it is structured around a production line,at the end of which materialises some standard product at a constantspeed. Setting a group of labourers to hoe a field or to pick olives is moredifficult. Either managers try to increase the quantity of work by payingpiece rates – which then requires measures to maintain quality – or theytry to ensure quality (the elimination of all weeds; the picking of all olives)by paying day rates and must then find ways to maintain work rhythms.Both solutions require a great deal of surveillance, usually in the form offield guards.

Martinez-Alier’s research, conducted when all autonomous workers’organisations were outlawed, explores the ways in which unión(solidarity) survived both as a value embedded in the moral evaluationof workers, and as a set of work practices contesting the landlords’control. The code of unión regulated a variety of issues: not acceptingemployment for less than the minimum wage – or less than the wage of


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those already employed; hiring practices; preferential treatment for thosemost in need. Solidarity often broke down, and individual workersadopted other tactics to deal with ‘dull economic compulsion’. The samehad been true in less oppressive periods: solidarity always had to beconstructed in the face of divisive labour practices and alternativecommonsense understandings of human nature and motive. I willconcentrate on three strands: the importance of place, the anathema ofpiecework, and the issue of gender.

The preferential employment of labourers from the pueblo was arecurring issue. Landlords often recruited from the mountainous areasand from Portugal, while local labourers demanded that outsiders shouldonly be hired if all those available in the pueblo had been taken on. Theattempt to exclude outsiders from employment has been interpreted asevidence of the strength of ‘parochial’ pueblo loyalty, undermining widersolidarity. Martinez-Alier argues that labourers did demonstratesolidarity with the seasonal migrants, and local practice was largely aquestion of maintaining union strength in the face of landlords’ attemptsto bring in rate-busters and strike-breakers. Even so, we should notunderestimate the link between ‘the people’ and place in labourers’ self-conceptions, or in their aspirations for local self-government. Someaspects of this emerge in a petition sent in 1931 to the civil governor ofMalaga from a village near Ronda – a document which also offers a rareinsight into labourers’ conception of their rights to land and its product:that it is in some sense theirs even if they do not own it.

After the harvest … the employers met and decided to give no work to thelabourers of this district. This is no way to live. A pueblo cannot support itself inthis way indefinitely, seeing workers of other districts come to take away ourwages. These fields were forged with the sweat of our brows, and now tenantfarmers with more land than they can farm themselves … come to take away theproduct of this land that is our mother, and this is done solely to force us toemigrate and leave the house and land of our birth. The village was founded byus less than fifty years ago, if the land produces it is because our labour has madeit valuable. We have always looked on these lands as something intimately ours,and though we do not own them at least they give us sustenance … In our ownland we are [now] more like strangers (forasteros, those from outside) than are thereal strangers. (Abbreviated from Corbin 1993: 40)

The second main area of conflict was over piecework, and the reasonbecomes clear when we see the dynamics of employment. Bringing in aharvest involves a certain quantity of labour: its organisation turns onthe numbers employed and the intensity of their work. There wereinformal agreements about what constituted normal work rates forspecified tasks: a rate that was sustainable over a period of days or weeks,


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without exhaustion (‘without taking too much out of one’s skin’). Thenormal work rate evolved over time and was built into the practice ofoverseeing work when labourers were employed on time rates. Thisinvolved ‘compliance’ with an agreement: ‘Cumplir sets a customary andobligatory minimum standard of effort and quality’ (Martinez-Alier1971: 179ff.). Cumplir, as the adherence to agreed work rates, feeds intothe practice of solidarity amongst labourers. It is also part of a generalisedview that the poor must work, and that in a just society all will work.Individual refusal of cumplir is not acceptable and undermines solidarity.This compliance was withdrawn only in times of heightened politicaltensions, as in the three ‘Bolshevik’ years, when a practice of ‘slow hands’and sabotage in the workplace supplemented all-out strikes.

Landlords preferred to employ labour on piece rates rather than timerates for the harvests, and were able to impose this employment contracton the labourers, except in rare periods when they lacked sufficientbacking from the state. Labourers abhorred piece rates; they representedincreased exploitation and the destruction of solidarity and equity.Although over a short period labourers might earn more than on dayrates, their total income for the harvest, and hence for the year, wasreduced. The result was fewer people, working harder, hence higherunemployment and lower incomes. They also objected to share-croppingarrangements as a disguised form of piecework. Brenan’s judgement,made in a time of labour militancy, has been much quoted:

The real struggle on the large estates was over destajo (piecework). There was agood reason for this. The landlords could not pay decent wages so long as theirlabourers did so little work. The labourers would not work harder because bydoing so they would increase the already cruel unemployment. The landlordsgot serf labour – that is bad and unwilling labour – but the labourers did not getthe one privilege of serfs, which is maintenance. (1960: 175)

Anarchism generally had a more egalitarian conception of genderrelations than the Catholic Church, with its stress on hierarchicalrelations within marriage. The most committed anarchists formedunions not sanctified by the church: this practice, known as ‘free love’,connoted not promiscuity but free will and commitment; it ‘demandedpurity and fidelity without clerical or government interference andcontrol’ (Mintz 1982: 91). Understanding domestic relations inAndalusia has been made difficult by the overgeneralised ethnographyof honour. Although women constituted a third of the labour force, menwere considered to have greater overall responsibility for providing ahousehold income. There were demands that no women should beemployed while there were men in the pueblo unemployed, to prevent


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men being left at home ‘watching the stew’ while the women were outin the fields – a circumstance considered ‘ugly’ or unnatural (Martinez-Alier 1971: 147). Men also said that there would be more unión if theywere all bachelors, which indicates not the political apathy of women,but how hard it was to maintain workplace solidarity in the face ofimmediate household needs and responsibilities – the actual operationof ‘dull economic compulsion’. Landlords preferred to employ women forcertain agricultural tasks, not because they were more docile (theevidence seems to be the opposite), but because they were paid only 80per cent of men’s wages. In 1963 the Fascist Syndicate equalised pay inorder to diffuse some of the tensions around unemployment.

Overall, there is evidence that unión survived as a strongly-held set ofvalues, but assessment of its effectiveness needs to be contextualised. Ina more open political climate, there is no doubt that these practices hadincreased income, and even for brief periods denied landlords effectivecontrol of their estates (Martinez-Alier 1971: 159). When the staterepressed open struggle, unión could still have some effect on livingstandards and create resistance to the most exploitative forms ofemployment. However, the main achievement in these more difficultperiods was the maintenance of forms of equality. Perhaps the most vividslogan of all those reported in the monographs is ‘Todos o ninguno’ –everyone or no one. In the 1920s Diaz del Moral observed that, if in aperiod of high unemployment a few labourers were taken on, therewould quickly follow a strike or demonstration to achieve work for all,and called this the dogma of equality (Martinez-Alier 1971: 149).

REVOLUTIONARY ACTION

Forms of solidarity and resistance were the only kinds of political actionpossible during Franco’s dictatorship. In earlier periods they had existedalongside revolutionary politics, and had involved other social groups.Unemployment was the focal point of social protest – the labourersthought that the land could provide work for all, but that the owners, toincrease their profits, did not cultivate as intensively as was possible, andskimped on certain agricultural tasks. They saw ‘land without men, andmen without land’ (Martinez-Alier 1971: 116), and with it extremesocial inequality. The solution was the division of the estates: reparto, apolitical rallying cry for a hundred years. Sometimes the demand was forcollective control, sometimes for individual plots, but whatever the form,reparto would generate work and liberty.

The struggle for reparto involved a movement which had from thebeginning also included artisans, peasant farmers, domestic servants and


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others. The fact that the anarchist movement constituted an alliance ofdifferent economic actors is sometimes seen as one of the reasons for itsweakness (cf. Aya 1975). Artisans and smallholders provided a dispro-portionate number of the activists. They had more tactical leverage, moreresources with which to sustain protest movements than the great massof desperately poor field-labourers, higher levels of literacy and widersocial networks. However, the alliance between these two groups hasbeen described as conflictual: in the strong version of this judgement, ‘Theclass struggle had, in short, been imported into the anarchist movementitself’ (Aya 1975: 94). The issue of conflict in this alliance needs carefultreatment, as do the shifting connotations of the term ‘class’.

Artisans, peasants and labourers had all suffered under the liberalpolicies of the Spanish state in the late nineteenth century, but the effectshad been varied. Land redistribution had made peasant farming morevulnerable; the consolidation of national markets made artisanproduction of textiles and metal goods uncompetitive in the face ofnorthern industry; the changing tax base hit all small producers. Inresponse they had developed a range of organisations characteristic ofartisans in this period – credit unions, co-operatives and mutual aidsocieties. The difficulties come with the historical judgement, found inboth Marxist and liberal interpretations, that one party to the allianceconstituted a social group over whom history was about to roll, whilethe other represented the future. Artisans and peasants have beenportrayed as part of a pre-industrial world, fighting a rearguard action tomaintain productive forms and values doomed to disappear, while thefield-labourers were for better or worse already locked into a moreadvanced capitalist system. If the diagnosis of conflict in the alliance ispredicated on the assumption that there were two classes with divergenthistorical trajectories, then history itself has proved rather morecomplicated. Certain forms of artisanal production may have becomeextinct, but the longer-term trend has not been a simple polarisationbetween capitalists and the propertyless. Various forms of householdproduction (in agriculture and industry) are again widespread; althoughadmittedly they occupy different parts of the economy and use differenttechnology from those of a century ago, and have complex relations withlarge-scale industry. The field labourers, on the other hand, turned outto be the dying breed, squeezed out by mechanisation.

We can explore further the issue of class and social division by lookingat local conceptions of work and identity. The ethnographic material ispatchy, and needs extrapolating from the kinds of questions anthropol-ogists used to ask rural people about attitudes to the land. Trabajo meanswork in the sense of manual labour, and is the basis for a dichotomous


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view of society. ‘“We” are manual labourers: the roughness or softnessof the hands becomes a sign of belonging to “us” or “them”. Hands are thebest passport … hands are the best identity papers’ (Martinez-Alier 1971:210). The objection to landlords is both their effect on unemployment,and that, like the civil guard and all those who stand and watch, they aresuperfluous to production. The quotations from Martinez-Alier’s researchin the 1960s represent enduring attitudes, as similar quotations fromPitt-Rivers in the 1950s and Diaz del Moral in the 1920s demonstrate.

However, the connection between the concept of trabajo and the issuesof work ethic and class identity is not straightforward, for two reasons.First, trabajo in Andalusia, like lavoro in Tuscany and related concepts inother parts of Europe, has (or had) a dominant meaning in terms ofworking the land – ploughing, planting, hoeing. Thus an overseer whodid some ploughing was considered to be doing work; whereas anotherman said of himself that, ‘He had worked since he was a child. It was onlyin the last eight years, when he became a shepherd, that he did not work’(Martinez-Alier 1971: 209). Thus labourers’ self-definition was built inpart around a discourse of manual labour and making the landproductive; possibly like other rural people, they considered field-labourprimary in the sense that it provided food, a universal necessity, and thisinfluenced relations with labourers outside agriculture. The evidence isfragmentary: certainly for a long period these labourers thought thatfood was the central necessity, and that virtually everything else was aluxury, if not a vice.

The second, more general, issue is that trabajo, at least in this usage,is not the kind of abstract term found in political economy: it makes noreference to the social relations (such as employment) within which workis embedded. When Martinez-Alier investigated work attitudes in the1960s, what he found was a mixture of three elements, with sometensions between them: the dull compulsion of economic relations(employment contracts and practices); revolutionary aspirations for asociety where all would have work and dignity; and the complex patternsof workplace resistance which survived under the fascist corporate state.His research was in fact a major influence on Scott’s more celebratedanalysis of resistance in Weapons of the Weak (1985).

The concept of trabajo also raises complex questions about solidarityand opposition. Peasants do manual labour in the fields – but does thatmake them labourers? What of wage-labourers who do not work in thefields, or artisans and professionals? In those pueblos which gravitatedaround the latifundia, all politics revolved around the opposition betweenfield-labourers and the landlords (Fraser 1973: 47). Other categorieswere assimilated to one or another side, but the anarchist movement


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itself does not appear to have been articulated around a generalisingconcept of work or wage-labour. Evidence for this comes from the cir-cumlocutions to describe different categories of people, such asprofessionals: ‘although they do not work, they also work’; or shepherds;or traders, who belong to ‘us’ for political purposes, even though they donot work manually.

This is not an argument for linguistic determinism – that such peopledid not have generalising conceptions of wage-labour or class becausethey did not have the right words to construct them. Trabajo and otherterms had been used to develop a theoretical understanding of capitalism,but this does not appear to have become the dominant strand in this localpolitical culture. In Sesto San Giovanni we found a class movementarticulated around an identity derived from wage-labour and the historicmission of a proletariat, while other economic groupings were assigneda very subordinate role, and sometimes excluded from the politicalalliance altogether. Andalusian anarchism was dominated numericallyby the field-labourers, but their identity was not constructed around ageneralised conception of wage-labour, and anarchism developed a veryinclusive political strategy.

The view that there was conflict in the alliance because of divergenthistorical destinies is oversimplified; nor is there any clear evidence thatits participants’ visions of the future were incompatible – that therewould only be room for one kind of worker in the future. If they hadembraced a Marxist-derived movement, that might have been true, sincethere would have been little room for artisans, peasants and other partsof the petty-bourgeoisie after a successful communist revolution. But inthose circumstances even the rural proletariat would have had a roughtime: it is hard to see how space would have been found for a millionlabourers on the state farms of Andalusia. Instead, the arguments comeback to a narrower issue of political strategy: not ‘What is oppressingus?’, nor ‘What is our goal?’ but ‘How do we get there?’

The key issue was the scope and effectiveness of strikes. On the estates,strike action could start around demands over pay and conditions andbe settled or defeated in those terms. It might also, however, be incorpor-ated or redirected as part of a general strike, where the anarchist sectionsbrought out labourers and the self-employed, paralysing all localeconomic and political activity. In the nineteenth century this wouldhave been a prelude to the seizing of municipal government, the burningof tax registers and other property, until the state intervened withmilitary force. In the first part of the twentieth century this range ofactions had largely dropped out of the political repertoire: the revolu-tionary strategy was built around a paralysing general strike and its


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co-ordination between pueblos and the cities. A general strike has animmense capacity to polarise local social relations: it forces all the ‘middlestrata’ – artisans, traders, peasants, overseers, muleteers – to take sides,to identify themselves publicly, through their actions and in ways whichmight be irreversible, with one or other of the groupings on the economicfault-line of the pueblo: labourers and landlords. Rather than simplyreflecting existing conflicts, the political divisions of the pueblo and theregion are constituted through the general strike.

In these circumstances ‘reformist’ strikes over pay did not precludehopes for reparto, or that events might escalate into a revolutionarysituation. But there were tensions within the coalition over the conductof general strikes, and accusations that ‘hotheads’ in the movementsometimes weakened it by trying to turn every strike into a insurrec-tionary confrontation. Artisans and peasants, who often formed amajority of the ‘obreros conscientes’, had no ‘reformist’ demands toachieve and had the tactical leverage to engage in more prolonged actionthan the field-labourers. As a result the activists blamed the collapse ofpolitical action on the limited resolve of field-labourers, while the attemptto turn all strike action into a revolutionary wave could jeopardise thepossibility of short-term gains for the labourers. In the end there couldbe no victory for either grouping in the alliance without defeating boththe repressive apparatus of the state, concentrated in the towns, and thelandlords who were the dominant class in the region. With the militaryinsurrection against the Republican government and the outbreak ofcivil war in 1936, the tensions in the alliance were submerged in therenewal of direct action against the state, with short-lived seizure of localgovernment, the formation of militias, the burning of churches, and thekilling of landlords and clergy.

CONCLUSION

There is something in the temper of anarchism which evokes millennialmovements – the term has been used by commentators from Diaz delMoral to Hobsbawm – but it is so freighted with misleading assumptionsthat it is best avoided. In part, the problems with the term are those whicharise whenever a political movement is described as religious since, asKaplan (1977) and others have remarked, religion creeps into theanalysis whenever actions are seen as either irrational or involvingstrong emotions. The overall argument of this book is that all transfor-matory political movements work through the articulation of identities,generating moral judgements and strong passions – that is, they all havefeatures associated with a stereotypical notion of religion.


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In addition, ‘millenarianism’ evokes a kind of religion which is partic-ularly ‘irrational’ in its aspirations for a better world, and in itsassumptions about how that will be realised, flourishing only amongstbackward populations not yet integrated into modernity. Judgementsabout backwardness or marginality are always embedded in powerrelations. Even allowing for this, there was nothing particularlybackward about Andalusia – it was not isolated from the economic andcultural circuits of the rest of Europe: its agriculture was integrated intoa capitalist economic system, its field-labourers were fighting over thesame issues of pay and workplace control as their contemporaries inother parts of Europe, its social programme on education, gender anddemocratic rights was highly ‘advanced’. That leaves two other aspectsof anarchism which have been seen as irrational: its utopian characterand its political strategy.

Anarchism was not a monolithic movement, and was itself only onestrand of the left in Andalusia; my intention is not to generalise aboutthe politics of the region, but to examine a political current which wassignificantly different from those derived directly or indirectly fromMarxism. Within that current there was one feature which does seem toecho Christian millenarianism – namely, the fact that certain ideas abouttime and moral absolutism were combined in political practice.

Above all else, anarchist labourers valued human liberty and itscorollary, equality. They were committed to the destruction of all author-itarian social relations, in the domestic and the public sphere, andcredited a more advanced form of consciousness to those (the obrerosconscientes) who had gone the furthest, or were the most intransigent, inrealising this ambition. The movement evolved in a society wherewealthy landlords dominated landless labourers, an opposition whichwas polarised and generalised to other social groups by the strategy ofthe general strike. This polarisation was constructed in terms of the moralqualities of the poor, who worked and shared, and the rich, who wereidle and competitive. Revolutionary ambitions were not confined toeconomic issues, and the polarised moral world, both before and duringthe Civil War, extended to include the church, the army and all agenciesof the state. At the same time the movement operated in an environmentwhich, while not ‘backward’, did not deliver economic or civic progressto the majority of its inhabitants.

This absence of forward movement contributes, I think, to the moralabsolutism of the struggle, and both together contribute a distinctivetwist to the revolutionary narrative. First, the view that, from a localperspective, today is as good as any other to make the revolution happen.There are more or less propitious moments in terms of harvests and


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dearth, but there is no long-term process in the economic domain whichincreases or decreases its chances of success. Success will be achievedwhen everybody ‘folds their arms’ at the same time, which is therecurring problem of co-ordination. Secondly, the belief that an act ofrevolution is an act of destruction: that in itself it will create the terrainon which existing moral precepts can be enacted. Nothing else fromsociety as presently constituted will be carried forward; nor is there asense that the future society will develop, in the sense given todevelopment by liberal or Marxist thought: no evolving division oflabour, no growth, no money.

The weaknesses of anarchist political strategy have long been arguedover, and are the mirror of its strengths. Anarchists could seize pueblos,but to be successful they needed to stretch the resources of the state byseizing them simultaneously, and holding the larger centres with theirgarrisons. Corbin’s summary of the problem mirrors the judgementsmade by the activists of the Casa Viejas uprising:

Anarchists also experimented with ways of making local insurrections spread ina revolutionary wave, with no success. They were perfectly aware that even veryweak state governments had the means to police isolated local disturbances andreverse sporadic local revolutionary successes … From the perspective of localinsurrectionaries, the revolutionary failure was not their actual defeat by anarmed force, it was the continued existence of the government which had sentthat armed force. Hence the quick collapse of so many local insurrections: thearrival of police or soldiers in itself meant that the revolution had failed and thatarmed resistance was pointless … Anarchists had two difficulties with revolu-tionary waves. They could maintain themselves in power in that place only ifanarchists also took power in other places … However any attempt to organizethat spread violated the community autonomy they sought to achieve. Secondthey could not control provincial capitals and major garrison cities … revolu-tionary waves could not be made from the bottom up. (Corbin 1993: 187)

A different argument might be made for anarcho-syndicalism inCatalonia, but it also has to be said that a range of countries was shakenby revolutionary movements in the years after 1918. In Spain and Italy,in Germany and Hungary, communist and anarchist movementsdeveloped a variety of political strategies to achieve a revolutionary trans-formation, but the existing states were stronger than any of them. If wemove away from the view that anarchism was the product of back-wardness and an ‘immature’ form of political mobilisation, we can get abetter view of its historical importance. For what is striking is how manyfeatures have re-emerged in contemporary politics: a stress on equality,and on a wide range of human and civic rights; a preference for small-scale local organisations which network and confederate. There is also


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a tradition of direct action, though this is not the monopoly of anarchism,or the left. All these aspects, and more, in various combinations andcolourations, are core themes in the ‘new social movements’.

SOURCES

My own fascination with the political cultures of Andalusia began withreading Martinez-Alier (1971), and I have drawn on that book substan-tially for the discussion of the latifundia, work relations and the practicesof workplace resistance. Fuller accounts of agrarian change can be foundin Malefakis (1970), and still-valuable accounts of the political landscapefrom Brenan (1960). Kaplan (1977) is a vivid and sympathetic accountof an earlier period of anarchist history, primarily in an urbanenvironment; Collier (1987) a reminder that not all districts wereanarchist. The debate about the modernity and effectiveness of ruralanarchism is long and complex: it includes Hobsbawm (1959), whichespouses the primitive thesis, Chomsky (1969), which attacks liberal andMarxist scholarship (though in relation to Catalonia), and Aya (1975),which is a very thoughtful and well-documented exploration of revolu-tionary strategy; he has returned in subsequent publications (1990) toissues of political morality. May (1997) is a very useful overview of thehistorical literature on anarchism and a reassessment of its relationshipto modernity. Corbin (1993) analyses Andalusian society at differentlevels, and offers a different interpretative frame from this chapter –although I have drawn on its source material and excellent summary ofthe political strengths and weaknesses of the movement. Pitt-Rivers(1954 ) and Gilmore (1980) produce contrasting anthropological inter-pretations of political relations in rural areas, a debate which can betraced again in Martinez-Alier. The section dealing with the activists’own understandings of their political task draws on Mintz (1982): amicro-history of one notorious episode – the Casa Viejas uprising of1933, reconstructed partly through oral history – it is multi-layered andbrilliant. Finally, two books deal with the period since the Civil War:Fraser (1973) is a personal, anecdotal and informative account of socialchange in one village; Foweraker (1989) is a heavyweight account ofpolitical mobilisation in Andalusia and the return of democracy, and abroad-based contribution to political theory.


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4 TUSCANY: PEASANTS INTO COMRADES

This chapter widens the range of class movements by examining themobilisation of a group of workers who were not wage-labourers at all,but share-croppers: the mezzadri of central Italy. For more than a decadeafter the end of the Second World War they struggled to gain control oftheir farms, in a campaign which dominated political life in theseregions and had an enduring impact on the political geography of Italy.It was in many ways a very simple political struggle, generating newforms of solidarity between share-croppers and attacking the linkagesbetween share-croppers and their landlords, both at the level of socialpractices (such as patronage) and in the ideological representations ofthe share-cropping system (the mezzadria). But in other ways thesimplicity is deceptive, and we can learn a good deal about this generalphenomenon of class mobilisation from the complex interactionsrevealed in this case study.

The complexity of this movement derives from at least three issues.The first is intrinsic to the mezzadria system, which created a kind ofduality in the lives of share-croppers: they were family farmers with con-siderable (if declining) control over their own working lives, who wereat the same time subject to a very overt and personalised regime ofsurplus extraction. The mezzadria itself was ancient and considered thebedrock of social order, especially in Tuscany; but as the twentiethcentury wore on the system was seen to be in need of some kind of reform.But what would the share-croppers become? There was a variety ofproposals, based on different interpretations of the existing system, someseeing share-croppers as in essence family farmers, some seeing them asdisguised proletarians. It would also be true to say that competing visionsof what constituted justice and an ideal social order influenced the inter-pretation of the present. Share-croppers mobilised to abolish the existingproperty relations, but that in itself said little about the kind of societythat they wished to create.

The second issue concerns the process of mobilisation and its purposes.Share-croppers formed a majority of the population in the central regions

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of Italy, but the success of their ambitions for land reform depended onforming alliances with other social categories, as well as action bynational government. In post-war Italy there were rival coalitions andcompeting programmes, but most share-croppers supported a left-wingcoalition led by the Communist Party (PCI), and found themselves in amovement dominated by wage-labourers, urban and rural. As we shallsee, a great deal of the share-croppers’ ambitions, strategy and identitywere shaped by the fact that they mobilised within and through theCommunist Party, a party which had its own framework for interpret-ing history and its own strategic objectives.

The third issue is the wider national and international context. Thefact that the political organisation for this struggle was provided largelyby the Communist Party, and that it took place during the Cold War, hada direct impact on its outcome and on the way the lines of conflict weredrawn. This chapter takes forward the previous discussions of identityand the ‘road to revolution’ by looking at how everyday politicalstruggles are redirected and reshaped by these wider national and inter-national processes.

The organisation of this chapter reflects the need to trace both themobilisation of a rural population for control over land and theirlivelihoods, and the wider political context. The long middle section ofthe chapter deals with the economic and political relations internal tothe share-cropping system in Tuscany, and with the various ways thiswas represented and interpreted. It is based in part on my ownethnography in the region. However, the chapter begins with an accountof the Italian Communist Party, covering the strategy and trajectory ofthe PCI from 1945 through to its dissolution in 1991, and payingparticular attention to the issue of revolution. The concluding sectionreturns to the political culture of the period and explores the everydaymanifestations of communist identity.

REVOLUTIONARY AND DEMOCRATIC ROADS

The Communist Party of Italy, founded in 1922, was committed to rev-olutionary action to overthrow the state. It believed (unlike theanarchists) that participation in parliamentary elections was a valuablemobilising strategy, but also that liberal democracy was an incompleteor ‘bourgeois’ form of democracy. The fascists had a different set ofobjections to liberal democracy, and it was they who came to power in1922. Repression and the abolition of democracy occurred regularly inother European countries over the following decades, but the CommunistParty in Italy was one of the first to experience this new form of ‘populist’

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reaction. The party drew certain conclusions from this defeat, andafterwards remained locked into its world-view. First, that if the majorindustrial and agrarian interests were ever seriously challenged in theircontrol over productive resources they would fund armed subversion toregain control. Secondly, that this was not such a complicated operation,because generally the existing repressive organisations of the state(police, army and judiciary) would either stand aside or support reaction.

The PCI survived fascism as a small, clandestine movement, with mostof its activists in jail or exile until 1943. The Italian government fell,German and Allied troops invaded, and the newly active communistleaders became the dominant force in the resistance movement in thenorth and centre of Italy. By 1945 the PCI was the largest politicalmovement, at the head of the Committees of National Liberation whichwere running northern cities, and with armed partisans at its back. Buta second historical event had just boxed off the party’s strategic options:Italy fell within the Allied sphere of influence under the agreementsnegotiated at Yalta. The British and American occupying forces had con-siderable freedom of manoeuvre to keep it that way; they cut their owndeals with supporters of the defeated fascist regime – some of whom werere-enrolled into the security forces – while the partisans were ordered tosurrender their guns. Any doubts about what was at stake were dispelledby the tragedy of the Greek Civil War.

Togliatti, the general secretary of the PCI, had returned from exile inthe USSR in 1944 and made clear both the implications of Italy’sgeo-political position (which had been the subject of much intelligence-gathering and speculation within the PCI even before Yalta), and theneed to move from being a clandestine vanguard party to a mass party,active throughout Italian society and seeking to become hegemonicwithin it. Constructing a Communist Party with broadly-based popularsupport, whose members were not even obliged to subscribe to Marxism,represented a spectacular shift, but it was not accompanied by anychange in the practices of democratic centralism in the internal life of theparty. A mode of operation which had emerged within a clandestine,scattered, insurrectionary movement, involving top-down decision-making, insistence on unity and intolerance of dissent, continuedvirtually unchanged within the new party. In the circumstances it is notsurprising that there were confusions and disagreements over PCIstrategy; about what constituted revolution and how it happened. ThePCI was thought to practice ‘doppiezza’, a double strategy whereby anapparent commitment to parliamentary democracy served as a cover forinsurrectionary ambitions. The accusation was used by the party’sopponents as a reason why it was unfit for government; but for a long


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time this was also a view held within the party itself, both amongst localactivists and some of the leadership. We can deal in turn with each of theroots of this ‘double’ strategy.

Soviet communism had immense importance as a symbol and anexample within the PCI , reinforced by the role of the USSR in defeatingfascism, and by its economic and technological successes: in the 1960smany economists still believed that the USSR would overtake the Westby the end of the century. The view that revolution necessarily involvedinsurrection was widespread amongst the Italian rank-and-file, andmany partisans had not wanted to surrender their guns. When anattempt was made on Togliatti’s life in 1948 there were spontaneousuprisings throughout north and central Italy: southern Tuscany was oneplace where ex-partisans dug up their guns, cut off communications andattacked the police. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, lacerations werecaused within the PCI by the debates which concluded that neither theOctober Revolution nor the Soviet experience constituted valid modelsfor contemporary Italy.

This understanding of revolution-as-insurrection was reinforced bythe memory of the fascist rupture with democratic politics. In the 1960sthere were more or less serious preparations for military coups; in the1970s, supposedly a period of international détente, the Cold Warimpacted very heavily on Italian politics. The decade began with thelaunch of a strategic review by PCI General Secretary Berlinguer, entitled‘Reflections on the facts of Chile’, prompted by the military defeat of ademocratically-elected Marxist government. Although the extra-parliamentary left concluded that the lesson of Chile was the need for theproletariat to be armed in a revolutionary conjuncture, Berlinguerargued for widening the party’s alliance to include ‘Catholic’ forces. Asthe decade proceeded, its electoral strength grew and the PCI came closerto government, there was increasing concern about threats to thatstrategy from what the press began calling, in coded terms, ‘parallel’ or‘deviated’ agencies of the state. There was a series of killings by the RedBrigades, and bombing campaigns against civilians which were theresponsibility of more obscure political forces. The decade ended with theassassination of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro at the handsof the Red Brigades, and with it an end to any possibility that the PCIwould enter the government. Investigations since have shed some lighton the shadowy organisations of the period, a labyrinthine network ofold fascists, young terrorists, Masonic lodges, army generals, secretservice agents and cabinet ministers. There were links between thesenetworks and military agencies which were part of an old anti-communist CIA-backed ‘stay behind’ operation called Operation Gladio.


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In the case of Moro’s death there are still questions about who did whatand for whom, but there can be little doubt that the PCI’s parliamentarystrategy was opposed by some very undemocratic forces.

We can now turn to the ‘non-insurrectionary’ strategy first outlinedby Togliatti in the closing stages of the war. The creation of a mass partywas immediately very successful: 1.8 million members were recruited by1946, which grew to more than two million a few years later, organisedin both territorial sections and workplace cells. The elections in 1945were the first in Italy conducted with universal adult suffrage, and in thefollowing years the PCI became the second-largest party after theChristian Democrats, and allied with the socialists in a Popular Front.But the mass party was not just conceived as an electoral machine, andthe leaders did not imagine that putting together an alliance that won51 per cent of the vote would usher in socialism. Nor did they thinkpolitics was confined to the parliamentary arena: the triumph ofsocialism would depend on long-term transformations within what wastermed ‘civil society’. So the mass party was also part of a strategy whichowed much to the work of Gramsci, and aimed to make the working classthe ‘directing class’ in a range of social contexts. These flanking organ-isations of unions, co-operatives, women’s groups, cultural and leisurecircles constituted a ‘communist world’ which broadened the politicalculture of the party and created a wider consensus for its programme.

This mass party was, in the early post-war decades, still linked to a rev-olutionary strategy, but one where revolution was conceived as a processrather than an event. This could be presented within a historical time-frame of the inevitable and irreversible defeat of capitalism, in orthodoxMarxist–Leninist mode; but it also implied a break with the OctoberRevolution as a model, and an allowance that there might be multipleroads to socialism. If the revolution was a process, then there would be aperiod of lengthy transition, and no clear moment when you could say aqualitative change had occurred (see Togliatti in Sassoon 1981: 138).This also implied identifying a programme of strategic reforms – strategicin the sense that they constituted crucial steps in a long-term strategy ofsocialist transformation, in fields such as workers’ democracy and reformof the state. What were the reforms that made a difference?

The PCI could point to its key role in the creation of a republic out ofthe fascist regime, and in the framing of a new constitution; but after twodecades of post-war political stability and economic growth, it becamehard to maintain the momentum. Attachment to revolution-as-insur-rection had declined amongst rank-and-file activists, but even with‘revolution-as-process’, gaps began to open up between ideology andpractice. The PCI had a highly disciplined and centralised structure, and


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talked constantly about socialism and revolution, but other aspects of itsbehaviour were similar to the European social democrats, who had neveraspired to overthrow capitalism. The judgement is perhaps over-simplified, and Sassoon’s formulation of the tension (Sassoon 1981:235–47) is helpful, bringing us back to the time-scales of political action:the strategic problem for the PCI was that revolution-as-process wouldcollapse back into a two-stage operation – before and after. On the onehand there was preparation for winning, building an electoral coalition;and on the other victory itself, conceived as taking over the ‘commandroom’ of the Italian state and controlling the levers of power.

By the 1970s the PCI had constructed a very powerful apparatus andhad indeed achieved great electoral success. It had widened its social basebeyond the industrial and agricultural proletariat to include many white-collar professionals and small business people, and had also begun toconceive of its base of support not just in class terms, but in relation toprocesses outside the sphere of production. In the 1970s women andstudents joined the list of social categories that the PCI claimed torepresent. It ran a swathe of regions in the ‘red belt’, and formed themunicipal government of most of the country’s great cities. In manysmall towns and urban peripheries a person’s social relations were livedalmost entirely under the umbrella of communist-led organisations. Yetwith all this consensus and such organisational resources, the PCIseemed cautious in pursuing strategic reforms, and – from Togliatti toBerlinguer – continued to believe that alliances with the ‘Catholic’ middleclass were possible. At the grass-roots level enormous energy was devotedto the arithmetic of elections, and the progress of the party seemed to bemeasured in percentage points – not by the creation of politicalhegemony within civil society or in the realisation of a programme,though there were some exceptions in local government. The key toelectoral success was identified in two themes: the democratic credentialsof the party, and its reputation for ‘clean hands’ in running the localadministration. Both were important, but seemed designed to reassurethe electorate that the PCI was ‘safe’. The party was also cautious in thecivil rights field, putting its huge resources behind various progressivecauses, but always after these had been opened up by other groups.

Some of the loss of momentum can be attributed to the failure of thePCI to anticipate the directions in which Italian society was moving. Itunderestimated the dynamics of Italian capitalism in the years of the‘miracle’, tried to ‘solve’ the mezzadria in the core ‘red belt’ while thecountryside emptied, and lived in awe of the Catholic Church even as itsdominance over popular culture and morality were eroding. It gave theimpression of intellectual inertia even when it was innovating, and here


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the political culture of the Cold War played its part. The routines ofMarxist-Leninism did not allow the easy acknowledgement of contribu-tions and insights from outside that tradition, and demanded that eachchange in party strategy be presented as a continuity – a developmentof the work of the ancestors.

There are many other reasons why the PCI failed to live up to theambitions it set itself, and not all of its failures were avoidable, as shouldbe clear from the comments on the Cold War. There are studies tracingthe evolution of PCI national strategy, but judgements about what theparty achieved and was attempting to achieve can also come fromevidence about what was actually happening at a grass-roots level; andhere regional variations intervene. The PCI often had a more radical edgewhere it was an embattled minority (in the Veneto, or parts of the south)than when it formed a majority government. In Emilia-Romagna it co-ordinated a very strong co-operative movement and had an unusualrecord of innovation, not least in forms of local democracy.

The next section will concentrate on Tuscany, where the PCI becamedominant through its mobilisation of the share-croppers. It will use avariety of materials, including my own ethnography, to trace the way apolitical movement emerged, and how it was shaped both by economictensions intrinsic to the system and by the competing political cultureswithin which its demands were articulated. This movement was noturban or proletarian: in a sense it could have gone ‘either way’, and thereare paradoxes in the eventual outcome. The concluding part of thechapter will turn to the political culture of the PCI in Tuscany after 1945,concentrating on collective identities and narratives in the long shadowof the Cold War.

THE MEZZADRIA

Tuscany was for centuries a remarkably stable society, built around ahierarchical division between the towns, with their landowninghouseholds and commercial activities, and a much larger ruralpopulation of share-cropping farmers. These share-croppers were notlandless labourers like those of Andalusia or Puglia, nor classic land-owning ‘peasants’ like those of the Veneto or the Basque country, withtheir more egalitarian social forms. Landlords owned the farm, thefarmhouse (casa colonica) and half the working capital, whilst the tenant(mezzadro) and his family provided the other half of the working capitaland all the labour, with the product divided equally between them. Somelandlords owned just two or three farms, others owned great estates with40 or 50 farms. The farmers (contadini) lived outside the town walls in


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the countryside, a pattern quite unlike the urban conglomerations of theItalian south. Prior to industrialisation the mezzadria was the keyinstitution shaping the relationship between town and country –spatially, economically and politically.

There were once millions of share-croppers in north and central Italy,but it had always been seen as a rather unusual system, not fitting themain categories of political economy. British and French observersstudied the system in the eighteenth century, as did the Tuscan landlords’agrarian association. Was this system the best way of optimisingproduction? Why was it so stable? Was there a trade-off between pro-ductivity and social peace? At the end of the nineteenth century socialistleaders also scrutinised this rural system, and concluded that share-croppers would be hard to mobilise in a revolutionary cause. Then, in thefirst decade of the twentieth century, a collective movement challengingthe landlords began to stir, and it exploded in the ‘red years’ after the FirstWorld War. Central Italian landlords were a key component of the fascistalliance, and they suppressed the rural movement with the same violenceused to regain control of the factories and the streets. Fascist intellectu-als also studied the share-cropping system, and the regime adopted it asa model of corporate relations between capital and labour, extending itto new areas in Italy. At the end of the Second World War the demand forreform re-emerged and had a lasting impact on the country’s politicalgeography, with the share-cropping regions of central Italy becomingthe ‘red belt’, where the left dominated.

These farming households were composed of joint families numberingup to 30 members, though ten was more normal. An intensive farmingsystem deployed a complex division of labour, by age and gender, underthe authority of the capoccia, the male head of household. The capocciasigned the annual contract, pledging the labour of the entire householdto the farm, and was responsible for delivering information on stocks forthe accounts, as well as often being the only one allowed to attendmarkets. The contract of a family was renewable – some share-croppinghouseholds stayed on the same farm for generations and centuries – butthey could also be moved between farms on the estate, or evicted at theend of the year for malpractice.

Some features of this system replicate the kind of peasantry whichMarx described as a ‘sack of potatoes’: households engaged in intensiveand diversified production to provide their subsistence needs, living ineconomic isolation from their neighbours. The difference was that theshare-croppers owned neither their farms nor their houses, and had onehalf of everything they produced taken from them. The form taken bythis surplus extraction is central to the economics of the system and its


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discourses of power. Landlords did not have to worry as much about thequantity or the quality of the work done as they would in a wage-laboursystem, since normally it was in the interest of mezzadri to harvest asmuch as possible and increase the productivity of the farm. Insteadlandlords needed eternal vigilance to obtain their half of the produce.This was the old management problem of the mezzadria, and in fact wehave some very vivid descriptions of it from the thirteenth century.Peasants might look dumb and behave deferentially, but within theirown world they were reckoned to be immensely cunning. These sameaccounts recommended techniques to prevent cheating, the best times todo the rounds, and methods of checking. On one estate I studied, thelandlord had even built a watch-tower for surveillance.

The share-croppers’ life revolved around the farm and householdneeds, but the system as a whole had always been part of a widereconomy, providing food and raw materials for the towns. In thenineteenth century the market orientation increased within themezzadria, bringing investment in new crops and technology,implemented through an extension of the estate system. It was the estate,with a manager and an administrative centre (the fattoria) thatpurchased the new industrial inputs to farming and stored threshingmachines or bulk wine-making facilities. In these circumstances theestate, rather than the farm, became the true unit of production: thelandlord sold in bulk the product of many farms, and he alone owned theessential machinery and facilities. Where centralised estates developed,the share-croppers were subject to increased accounting processes anda substantial reduction in their autonomy over farming decisions.

In the period between Italian unification in 1870 and 1945, there wasincreasing tension within the mezzadria between the subsistence logic ofthe farm and the market orientation of the estate. The balance betweenthe two was the result of a series of strategic decisions made by Tuscanlandlords, and informed by studies and debates within their agrarianassociation. There was a variety of considerations. First there werequestions about productivity and the market. The classic mezzadria beganto appear backward in its technology, perpetuating low levels of pro-ductivity and very unresponsive to new markets. In the Lombardy plain,where commercial pressures were felt more strongly, many landlordshad responded by switching to specialist production with wage-labour.They created a rural proletariat which, by the end of the nineteenthcentury, was becoming active under the direction of the rural leaguesand the Socialist Party. In Tuscany they noted the lesson: there was atrade-off between productivity and rural unrest. The mezzadria was keptin place, and less disruptive ways of introducing market relations were


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found through the estate system and the selective use of wage-labour.Thus, amongst the more entrepreneurial landlords, commercial life didquicken within the mezzadria. However, a combination of inertia and adeliberate strategy by the more politically reflexive landlords kept theshare-croppers themselves locked into a subsistence regime. This wasbecause social control was the second part of the landlords’ equations.

A Tuscan farmer recounted to me a conversation he had once heardbetween two landlords. They were discussing the recurring problem ofunruly share-croppers, and one of them said, ‘Good mezzadri need goodhealth, much work, and no money’, a phrase which encapsulates thepolitical economy of the period. Landlords of course wanted their half ofthe product, but they were also alert to the social processes whichthreatened the rural hierarchy. They did not want any of their farmingfamilies having a moment’s idleness; nor did they want them near thebars or the market, meeting people. If the share-croppers had money theywould spend it, and this would mean, firstly, time subtracted fromfarmwork, secondly the development of vices (smoking, drinking,gambling), and thirdly meeting people – especially in bars and in thetowns, which were a breeding ground for unwholesome political ideas.Even the first stirring of commercial life outside the city was seen asthreatening. The Marchese Incontri in 1925 lamented that ‘thepatriarchal calm of the Tuscan countryside had been spoilt by the bicycleand the circulation of newspapers, which had irremediably broken theisolation of the peasants, thus destroying their characteristic ingenu-ousness, docility, diligence and parsimony’ (Pazzagli 1979: 109).

In the first half of the twentieth century there were many politicaldiscourses defining the mezzadria in relation to society and history. Theoldest and dominant representation was constructed in hierarchical andorganic terms: the landlords were the head of the social body, theydirected society – they even grew their little fingernails long to show theydid no manual labour, and demanded respect from those who did.Landlords inhabited the città, and were judged on their civilised valuesand lifestyle; share-croppers, contadini, were judged on their capacity forwork. The landlords had the power to control their dress, theirconsumption habits, and even when they married. Contadini had to knowtheir place in the world, which was on the farm; when they fulfilled theobligations of their social position they were invisible to the urban world,and when they were visible it was a sign of vice or transgression.

These organic models of society, and the practices which embodiedthem, were still detectable in 1970 when I first began fieldwork inTuscany. You could find plenty of witnesses to the traditional forms ofdeference (including in one case the obligation to kneel when the


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landlord arrived on the threshing floor); and you could interviewaristocrats who regretted the passing of these ways. However, in the post-war period a second, more liberal, understanding of the mezzadria gainedground amongst the system’s supporters. In this representation, share-cropping was based on a partnership between capital and labour, withthe risks and the benefits shared equitably between the two. Tuscanywas fortunate to have developed such an harmonious system, and it wasfolly to abandon it or tinker with the equal division of the benefits. Thismore ‘market-oriented’ discourse, resting on notions of voluntarypartnership and equality, is obviously incompatible with organichierarchies. Nevertheless the two discourses co-existed in the fascist andthe post-war period, being elaborated in different social contexts.

Of the two, the hierarchical version made most sense to contadini,because it corresponded to their experience of living in an isolated world,with its daily forms of deference and absence of civic rights. This did notmean that share-croppers considered the system just, and we know thatthey resisted its exactions, but at a certain point they began mobilisingin new ways. Historians have analysed the factors producing this politicalradicalisation, suggesting one which was ‘structural’ and internal torural social relations, and another which was more ‘conjunctural’ andexternal. The ‘structural’ factor was the commercialisation of themezzadria, and the subtle but important changes it wrought inlandlord–tenant relations. New farming practices meant that the oldcontracts had to be modified, and were contested. In the past share-croppers had been part owners of the working capital (oxen andimplements); now that landlords started to own all the importantequipment, the balance between labour and capital shifted, and strugglesbegan over costs and returns. Technological changes increased landlordcontrol over the labour process, and the household increasingly obeyeda daily round of orders – a situation they shared with all the other share-croppers on the estate, strengthening horizontal ties in an environmentpreviously dominated by relations of patronage.

The ‘conjunctural’ impetus to radicalisation was war, since the twomajor mobilisations in 1919 and 1945 both followed the demobilisationof armies largely conscripted from the rural population. Between 1915and 1918, war widened the experience of a whole generation by takingthem off their farms for the first time, and ended with promises of landand justice from the government. The share-croppers became majoractors in the Red Years from 1919 to 1921. They elected socialist (andpopulist) councils, demonstrated for the abolition of the mezzadria, andachieved significant improvements in their contracts. The fascist reactionreversed the improvements and froze all overt political action. Between


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1943 and 1945 war moved through central Italy, totally disrupting therural economy. Since the mezzadria had become so completely identifiedwith the fascist regime, defeat seriously undermined the legitimacy of thelandlords, while the PCI, which had been the major organisational forcein the resistance, gained legitimacy.

The mobilisation of the share-croppers in 1919, and again in 1945,are major events in Italian political history, and at one level represent astraightforward class polarisation. On one side there were land-owners:when first seriously threatened they backed a reactionary government;and when fascism collapsed they defended themselves by calling in thepolice to deal with every demonstration, and by endless use of the law todeal with breaches of contract. On the other side we find the mezzadrimobilising around an escalating series of demands, starting with thedivision of the farms’ product. The mezzadria was built around a veryvisible and personalised form of surplus extraction, and contesting itfocused on two aspects: the customary tribute or regalie taken to thelandlord’s house, and the harvest, which was the focus for strikes on thethreshing floor. Women mobilised on all these issues, but in additionwanted contractural recognition as full working members of the farm(unità di lavoro).

The mezzadri wanted to wrest from the landlords first greater controlover estate management, then a greater share of the product; in the endthey challenged existing property rights, the foundations on which themezzadria was built. From the accounts of activists in the late 1940s and1950s this was not an easy step, both because of caution in PCI strategy,and because of the share-croppers’ deference. Although private acts ofappropriation and disrespect might exist, most share-croppers had beeninculcated with pervasive habits of public subservience, and even in theworst of times for many people the landlords’ rights to the land retainedsome kind of legitimacy. An activist, describing the problem of politicalmobilisation in this environment, used a phrase which he said came fromthe Spanish anarchists: ‘We must create men who cast shadows.’

Those working on the farm saw little that was positive in the towns:just landlords who took away half the food, state officials who did thelandlords’ bidding or conscripted men into the army, and a crew of otherparasites – including the priesthood – who lived up on the hill at theirexpense. But they took their struggle to the towns, since that was wherethe power lay, and where their own force would become visible.However, the small provincial centres of Tuscany were a hostileenvironment dominated by the landlords and the church, extolling anideology of localism (campanilismo), hierarchy and organic unity. The leftcontested every occasion and every organisation which articulated this


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model of local unity, and adopted forms of political practice whichmarked out alternative constructions of society. The model of boss andlabourer working quietly together in harmony was counteracted by thetwo major forms of political action: the strike and the demonstration.From the 1948 uprising, through the major battles over contracts, to thelater anti-fascist demonstration, strikes and demonstrations were usuallycombined, and represented moments of rupture. The country invadedthe town, all economic activity was suspended, and the vertical relationsbetween landlord and share-cropper gave way to horizontal relationsbetween people who assembled from all over the province, and whodefined themselves around a class, not a local identity.

Yet though the lines of division were simple, the struggle itself wascomplicated by ambivalence about what the share-croppers actuallywanted to achieve and who they would ally with to achieve it. Here weencounter two further representations of the mezzadria, this timeamongst those who wanted to reform it. Were they peasants manqué,eager to take their natural place in a society of property-owning familyenterprises? Or were they ‘semi-proletarians’, whose exploitation madethem allies of wage-labourers in the building of socialism? Each vision ofa future society led to a different interpretation of the present, while eachreforming project was shaped by the increasingly polarised politicalcultures within Italy as a whole.

Property-owning households were central to the social doctrine whichthe church had developed in the late nineteenth century in response toliberal and Marxist materialism, and which was an ideological pillar ofthe Popular Party and the ‘white leagues’ which developed between1918 and 1922. These ‘white leagues’, strongest in the north, hadconducted an aggressive campaign against landlords and in favour ofproperty-owning small farmers. The programme re-emerged in thegoverning Christian-Democrat Party (DC) after 1945. The Italiangovernment enacted a partial land-reform programme, expropriatinglandlords in various southern provinces and in the Maremma (thecoastal plain between Rome and Livorno). Using credit made available bythe government, others were able to buy out property rights where thelandlord was prepared to sell. In this way the ‘anomaly’ of the mezzadriawas resolved through the creation of family farmers by the rulingCatholic Party – though it was always selective, and needed buttressingby a paternalistic reform agency.

In the ‘Red Years’ from 1919 to 1921 the left had generated a differentprogramme – a Bolshevik model of collectivising the land at the estatelevel. There was little trace of this programme when mobilisationresumed in 1945, though one of the instruments created in the struggle


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would have facilitated this transformation. On many estates householdselected a commissione di fattoria, (a kind of rural ‘factory council’) tonegotiate with the landlord. These could have been an instrument forcollective management, or even collective ownership; instead they weredissolved within a few years. The Communist Party, in alliance with thesocialists, won control of most local councils in central Italy. Its strategywas based on the building of a broad anti-capitalist alliance in order totake control of national government. The share-croppers were animportant part of that alliance, since they were clearly an exploitedcategory of workers, and the party’s own analysis had identified ways inwhich the capitalisation of agriculture had moved the form of exploita-tion closer to that of the proletariat. However, they remained ananomalous category within that alliance. A speech given at Siena in1956 by Emilio Sereni, the Communist Party’s major theoretician onrural society, reveals how this anomaly was conceived, and how a longerhistorical time-frame would allow its resolution:

The principal task on the eve of the overthrow of capitalism is to create in thecountryside the alliance most favourable for a socialist transformation … It isclear that for us in this historical context, in this historical phase, it is essentialto have a bloc made up of all the working masses in the countryside. This mustinclude those strata of the peasantry who certainly have elements of a capitalistorientation, but who are in opposition, like the rest of the peasantry, to monopoly,to the great landed interests … It is evident that the aspiration of peasants whenit is not illuminated by Marxist doctrine, is a petit-bourgeois aspiration, whichthrough explanation we can direct onto the right road. The road must be thetransformation of the share-cropper into the owner of the land, because this iswhat can be realised in the present phase of society. (In Bonifazi 1979: 86)

The general strategy was based on a broad economic category – all theworking masses – and the realisation of a general interest – the con-struction of socialism. At a national level the PCI had difficulties holdingtogether this ‘bloc’, whose component parts had a variety of more specificinterests and were evolving according to very different rhythms. Itsupported the share-croppers’ demand to own their own farms, but onlyas an intermediate objective on the road to socialism – and with the veryimportant proviso that its realisation should in no way threaten the unityof the wider alliance on which the attainment of socialism depended. Itwas in this context that the drama unfolded. The PCI campaigned for acomprehensive land reform programme which would deliver individu-ated land rights, and found itself in competition with the ChristianDemocrat government, which also favoured the transformation of share-croppers into family farmers – but selectively, through a piecemealreform programme and credit schemes. The PCI, with its slogan ‘The land


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is conquered, not bought’, was hostile to the initiatives of both thegovernment and the share-croppers themselves, which threatened thesolidarity of the movement, especially in the Italian south. But someshare-croppers paid a price for this hostility, which emerges in thiscriticism of PCI strategy from one of those directly involved:

The possibility of buying the land was considered only in the face of an attackfrom the landlords, when there was the danger of mezzadri and labourers beingevicted, and even then only through co-operative forms. The attraction of land-ownership to individuals was under-estimated, above all in areas where a spiritof co-operation and an awareness of collective work was less advanced, despitethe presence of large estates. Above all we must note the failure to take theinitiative in buying land at a moment when the battle over the contract hadalready convinced many large landowners that it was impossible to beat thestrong peasant organisations. So they decided to sell up. This new battle-groundwas not immediately identified by the Federmezzadri, to the contrary it gave theinitiative to the landlords and to the break-away Catholic organisations.(Bonifazi 1979: 87)

This specific criticism of PCI policy, like the preceding quotation fromSereni, raises wider questions. Take away the revolutionary transfor-mation from this political narrative, concentrate on the ‘short-term’question of which political force was best placed to deliver them landreform, and the share-croppers’ choices start to look rather different. Itbrings out the way in which local struggles are transformed by nationalclass politics and channelled into a wider project which incorporatesthem in a reforming or revolutionary vision of the whole of society. Ofcourse, if 1956 had been the ‘eve of the collapse of capitalism’, we wouldbe dealing with a very different history. Instead we find that, while familyfarming emerged in the reform areas, elsewhere there was a massiverural exodus, leaving empty estates which would eventually be run withwage-labour.

The PCI did not make much progress towards a socialist transforma-tion, in Tuscany or anywhere else. Living standards certainly rose,though there remained striking disparities of wealth, especially in thewine districts. The PCI provided a political home for a broad spectrum ofsocial groups, not least the ex-share-croppers who continued to supportit after becoming owners of small businesses, farmers, builders,shopkeepers and hoteliers. It is here that the failures of a process ofstrategic reforms become evident. Tuscany did not develop the extensiveco-operative movement found in Emilia, or other ways of linking smallproducers either in horizontal chains with each other, or in verticalchains with consumers. The small-business sector became very defensivein its political reflexes, often highly dependent on state subsidies and on


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benign tolerance of tax evasion, and was both vulnerable to widermarkets and extensively penetrated by larger industrial interests.

In the 1980s I encountered a group of farmers, all PCI members, whohad founded a cattle-rearing co-operative, dependent on subsidies fromthe Tuscan region. They bought most of their supplies from an interna-tional company selling animal feed, and were servicing substantial loans,obtained at very high fixed interest rates from one of Italy’s largest banks.Their main sales outlet was a branch of the communist-run co-operativemovement, which then precipitated a financial crisis when it switchedto buying imported meat. The Tuscan region pulled the plug on thefarmers’ co-operative. Soon afterwards, local shops in the consumers’co-operative also shut, to be replaced by a branch of the national chainowned by Silvio Berlusconi. This was not a secure environment for smallbusiness; it offered few controls over the economic context in which theyoperated, and little resistance to the growing concentration of resourcesin the market-place.

THE FORMATION OF COMMUNIST PARTY IDENTITY

The PCI put down deep roots in the Tuscan provinces after 1944, andestablished very stable forms of political allegiance, while the society ofwhich it was a part changed out of all recognition. Share-croppers, themillennial backbone of Tuscan society, had gone by the 1970s. Some ofthe migrants went north to Turin and Milan, while the majority movedto towns in the region. Many of their children, the first generation to haveaccess to secondary education, then moved through the universities inthe tumult of the 1960s and into the professions. The social base of theCommunist Party in Tuscany widened enormously, not just because itwent looking for support amongst the middle classes, but because itmaintained the allegiance of a million rural people as they moved, geo-graphically and socially, within Italian society. This stability reflects thestrong identification with the party which derived from the politicalprogramme already discussed, but also from at least two other factors:the social forms and values the PCI developed, and the social context ofthe Cold War.

The party generated comradeship – a deeply-rooted practice ofsolidarity and inclusion, offering collective support not just in the ratherindividuated work relations between share-croppers and their landlords,but in the neighbourhood sections, in the feste and other leisureactivities.There were symbols of belonging in all the social contextswhere the PCI operated. Comradeship was based on an ethic of socialegalitarianism, signalled most prominently by the use of the informal tu


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form of address amongst comrades. This was a striking break for thosecoming from a rural environment, where non-reciprocal speech codes(using voi and lei) were obligatory to all strangers and townspeople. Therewas also discipline and hierarchy in the PCI, but not a great deal ofdeference, while the rank-and-file on the whole respected their leaders,most of whom in this period came from the resistance and from the samebackground as themselves.

There were of course degrees of commitment in this social world. At aminimum, party members attended meetings and all bought thenewspaper – L’Unità – which functioned as a public marker of belonging.They also read it – despite its notoriously esoteric linguistic style – andfound that, like all newspapers, it was premised on its readers constitut-ing an ‘imagined community’. This was not Anderson’s community ofthe nation, but a community of workers; and it was on that basis thatnational and international events became news. At a higher level ofcommitment were party activists who had attended residential coursesat one of the PCI schools, and had the crucial role of mediating local andnational politics. Men dominated the leadership ranks, and these wereexpected to devote most evenings and weekends to organisationalactivities. Members valued leaders who were preparato (imbued withknowledge about party history and strategy) and coerente (living by theprecepts that they advocated). The acclaimed personal qualities of theleadership – their austerity in rejecting a ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle and thededication of their lives to the party – were essential components of thismoral order. The party was something one could dedicate one’s life to; itwas a cause – whether one was a leader or a follower – and in this waya political identity was located in a collective and personal historicalnarrative.

Identity as a comrade was forged in the practices of solidarity, unity,loyalty and discipline in the rich life of the party section, the Casa delPopolo, the feste. This political culture was created through a socialpattern which brought a spectrum of people together outside theworkplace, and its decline was due in part to the spread of television andthe domestication of leisure and consumption. Until its demise, thecommunist identity was generated in a narrative of who ‘we’ were, andwho ‘we’ were opposed to, located in a growing history of interventionin Italian political life. This narrative was still locked into the metaphorof the road which we first encountered in Sesto San Giovanni; but theemphasis had shifted, and as the road had lengthened it had acquired apast as well as a future. There were still subtle and pervasive metaphorsconstructing political divides in terms of progress: the workers and theirparty were nearest to the future, the most advanced sector of society. For


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example, as the great rural exodus filled industrial cities with southernmigrants, they were said to be ‘workers like us’, but from a morebackward political culture of deference and deception. But thecommunists’ own identity narrative became weighted with tradition andritual. Members would learn about the history of their local party, andstories about their national leaders into which were compressed complexpolitical meanings: Gramsci in prison, Amendola organising thenorthern resistance under the noses of the fascists, Togliatti at Salerno.Leaders elaborated a party line on the basis of insights from their prede-cessors, and their own authority on the basis of intellectual pedigree. Asa demonstration rolled through the streets of any city in the 1970s, therank-and-file would roar, ‘We are communists, the party of Gramsci,Togliatti, Longo, Berlinguer.’

Inclusion and exclusion work together, and communist identity wasstrengthened and stabilised by a second factor. The virulence of the ColdWar created an international fault line between eastern and westernEurope – and no less so within societies of both east and west, in eachcase redefining national identity and the spectrum of legitimate politicalaspirations. In Italy the dominant nationalist discourse was definedaround the country’s location within the free west, and for the first timearound its Catholic culture. Those who were opposed to this western andCatholic trajectory were represented as subservient to the nation’senemies. This had several consequences for the class politics we havebeen following. Firstly, the contest became one between Catholic andcommunist political forces, and was often articulated at the level ofideology in terms of freedom, religion and morality. Secondly, theoutcome of all class movements hinges on a struggle over key institu-tions at the national and state level, but during the Cold War thesenational institutions (the agencies of the state, including the army, thensecret services, and the Catholic Church) were themselves locked into,and responsive to, an international order which included the NATOalliance and, above all, the United States. The result was a substantialwidening of the political terrain, so that the outcome of a local struggleby share-croppers to achieve a comprehensive and equitable land reformwas dependent on those larger factors which determined whether thePCI would take power: the capacity of the church to convince voters thatit was impossible to be a Catholic and a communist, and the resolve ofthe United States to intervene in its sphere of influence. It was of coursethe role of the mediating cadres of the PCI to explain those higher-levelfactors, and to translate local demands into a strategy appropriate to thenational and international context.


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It is important to stress both that these national and internationalfactors fed back into local politics, and that the polarisation of Italiansociety and broadening of the political agenda were played out on thestreets of small Tuscan towns. The aesthetics of a building, thecelebration of a wedding, the value attached to local identity – all mightbecome the focus for competing claims about the truth of differentpolitical ideologies. The arguments which erupted in public placesenacted a kind of political schismogenesis: they presupposed a worlddivided into two camps, contrasted as positive and negative, with themiddle terms and areas of shared experience excluded by the dynamic ofthe argument. The most banal remark could trigger an argument whosecontent focused on the errors of the opposing parties: a comment on thedeficit of the local administration led to a reply about the obscurity ofVatican finances. Such discussions could escalate across the whole rangeof the opponent’s political world: ‘In Russia you are not allowed tocriticise anybody’s finances’, might be countered with, ‘If you looked atwhat the church did during the Inquisition, you would not lectureanybody on liberty.’

In these kinds of exchange the speaker was held responsible for all theactions within their chosen political world. For a Christian Democratthis included the Catholic Church and the Pope, conceived of as integralparts of Italian society. Communism was represented as a unitaryphenomenon, realised in the Soviet bloc to which local communistswere loyal and obedient – so that Russia, an external power, was themain point of attack, since it revealed the true nature of communism.These exchanges rarely followed a linear theme, but had built into thema tendency to escalation, since each speaker would attempt to move tothe highest possible moral ground, reflecting the dominant discoursesof the Cold War, which portrayed these political differences as contestsbetween good and evil. They involved particular political skills – theability to move sideways when boxed in, to find unexpected ripostes,and to have the last word, thus exiting from the escalation. Successrequired a deep knowledge of political history: if, in the middle of areferendum campaign, your opponent suddenly stated that Togliatti hadbeen opposed to legalising divorce, you could lose a great deal ofauthority by showing surprise or by not having an answer. There wastheatre in these encounters: Tuscans value verbal skills, finezza, andsuch exchanges may have owed something to traditional forms of verbalduelling. But there was a great deal at stake when a person, identifiedwith their party, publicly challenged or defended the hegemonic repres-entations of the social order. We might better think of this as a form ofGeertz’s ‘Deep Play’.


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CONCLUSION

As a political subject, the PCI created a complex ‘communist identity’which, Li Causi argues (1993: 96ff.), was built precisely on the diversesocial positions of its members (rural and urban, manual labourer andprofessional, employee and self-employed) and the establishment ofsolidarity on the basis of common values. Living this communist identitydid not obliterate membership of any other social group or category, butwas higher than any of them: loyalty to the party conditioned solidaritywith a share-cropper, or a fellow-townsperson (compaesano) whosupported a rival party. Togliatti’s mass party of the post-war periodcreated a political identity of ‘we comrades’ (noi compagni) that was morecomplex than the proletarian identity of Sesto San Giovanni. Twoconclusions can be drawn from this – the first specific, the second moregeneral. Firstly, the PCI did not create a socialist Tuscany, but it was themovement which produced an historic transformation of peasants intocitizens, able for the first time to claim rights and participate in a politicaland civic culture. This was not produced by the unrolling of someinevitable process of modernisation. It was fought for – and those familiarwith the period will know that it was strongly resented and resisted by –entrenched urban power, and the paternalistic condescension of Catholicintegralism, with its vision of rural segregation. As a process it should beassessed on the same terms as other civil rights movements.

Secondly, even a compressed summary of this period illustrates thevariety of processes which shape the direction taken by a politicalmovement. It is not that the lines of class division were particularlycomplex; they were in fact clearer here than in any of the other examplesused in this book, etched in the landscape. But those social divides didnot map cleanly onto the central political fault line in post-war Italy –that between the Catholic and communist movements – since bothsought in various ways to establish property rights for share-croppers.Their struggle for autonomy was incorporated into a wider Italianpolitical battle, itself heavily conditioned by the dynamics of superpowerrivalry, with decisive consequences for themselves and for the politicalculture of the region.

SOURCES

There is a very large literature in English on share-cropping and the ruraleconomy in central Italy. Silverman’s work in Umbria is based onresearch while the mezzadria was still extant: her 1975 volume, ThreeBells of Civilization, was a pioneering work in terms of its combination of


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anthropological and historical data, and there are a number of otherarticles (Silverman 1965; 1970; 1977). Gill (1983), Lyttleton (1979)and Snowden (1972; 1979) deal with the first stages of political mobil-isation and the fascist reaction. I have also drawn on my own researchin southern Tuscany on economic and political change (Pratt 1980;1987; 1994). There is an even larger literature in Italian, includingSereni (1947) who began the long debate about the mezzadria and thetransition to capitalism, continued in Giorgetti (1974), with more recentcontributions in Pazzagli et al. (1986). I am particularly indebted to theanthropologist Pietro Clemente, whose perspective on rural society (somepublished: Clemente 1980; 1987) challenged my own thinking.

There was enormous interest in the Italian Communist Party in the1970s and 1980s on the part of historians and political scientists,including Sassoon (1981), Davidson (1982) and Boggs (1986). A secondindustry grew up around the work of Gramsci: Lumley (1977), Hall(1996) and Urbinati (1998) give some idea of the variety, and providefurther sources. The complex relationship between ‘official’ communistnarratives and rank-and-file interpretations of history is explored in avariety of sources, from Portelli (1990) to Periccioli (2001). There arealso anthropological studies. I have drawn on my own research onpolitical cultures, some of it published: Pratt (1989 and 2001) deal withpolitical language and practice, while Pratt (1986) includes a moredetailed analysis of Cold War polarisation. Kertzer (1980) is a veryaccessible account of grass-roots social and political life in Bologna; his1996 study is based on a wider range of sources and adopts a morecritical perspective – both will be enjoyed most by those who areprimarily interested in politics as symbolic action. Shore (1990) uses amulti-disciplinary approach, including his own fieldwork in Perugia, totrace the history of the PCI from 1921 until its dissolution. This is a verywell documented account, which takes communism to be inseparablefrom democratic centralism, a viral infection first acquired from theBolsheviks. These studies have many strengths, but do not convey muchof what party members and supporters gained, or lost, from their mobil-isation in this cause, beyond the company of others. Li Causi (1993),concentrating on a small area (Siena province) gives the reader someglimpses of the loyalty and passion, and a sense of a society in movement.


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5 A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

The previous three chapters on Sesto San Giovanni, Andalusia andTuscany examined revolutionary class movements, and before we moveto the politics of ethnicity and nationalism, this short chapter will takestock of what has emerged so far. It will deal in turn with the processesof mobilisation and the issue of identity, in order to suggest somecommon themes which run through class movements, as well ascomparisons between them.

First, we have to return to the term ‘class’. There are debates aboutthe theorisation of class as an economic category (defined either as alayer within a stratified structure, or as a relationship within a productivesystem); there are debates about classes as collective political actors; andabove all there are debates about the relationship between economiccategories and political movements. Within the Marxist tradition theycentre on the famous distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself. One of the most important discussions emerged out of E. P.Thompson’s analysis of The Making of the English Working Class(Anderson 1980; Kaye and McClelland 1990; Thompson 1963; Wood1995). One approach sees the political as a direct reflection of theeconomic: the capitalist economic system creates classes – people whooccupy the same position in a production system; they then do eitherbecome conscious, or do not, of that position, and articulate their sharedinterests. When classes acquire ‘consciousness’ they become consciousof their economic position, the interests they articulate are essentiallyeconomic, and the composition of the resulting political movement iscongruent with the economic category of its members, give or take a fewintellectuals who provide consciousness and direction. Class as a politicalterm is, in this view, coterminous with its economic counterpart. It iseasy to use shorthand phrases (such as ‘the Italian Communist Partymobilised the working class’) which reproduce this formula.

Others object to a framework which takes class as a given and preferto see class as a more purely political phenomenon. In breaking with thereductionism of some Marxist models and formulations, some writers

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then go on to minimise any connection between the way productivesystems structure social relations and political movements – instead,class is constructed discursively. ‘The ultimate conclusion of thisargument must be that a caveman is as likely to become a socialist as aproletarian – provided only that he comes within hailing distance of theappropriate discourse’ (Wood 1986: 61; see also Gledhill 1994: 186).

These are polarised positions within a debate about class, and it is easyto draw the conclusion that neither economic reductionism nor (post-Marxist) idealism will reveal the dynamics of class movements. We needan approach which explores the interaction of complex economic andpolitical processes, and though such an approach does not producesimple formulae, there are some general points which emerge from thepreceding case studies. Firstly, capitalism creates a variety of productionsystems, and many forms of socio-economic inequality: those based onwage-labour are historically very important, but we should not assumethat ‘the working class’ is synonymous with the proletariat. The workingpopulation includes people who gain their livelihoods from a variety ofactivities, and whose lives are shaped by a complex mixture of autonomyand dependence. Secondly, in order to understand the strategies forgaining a livelihood outside (or alongside) wage–labour relations, weneed to think critically about what we mean by ‘the economy’ (and‘economic interests’). In contemporary society ‘the economy’ tends to bea category which covers only monetised relationships, a sphere regulatedby its own autonomous laws or rationality. Narotzky (1997: 220) haspointed out that it has come to refer to only a small part of total socialreproduction, but has nevertheless become the general framework forthe interpretation of social life.

Thirdly, we have seen that class boundaries – the lines of opposition –are a response to the way production is organised, but also, and morespecifically, to the way each movement interprets the configuration ofinterests amongst the different actors within the economy. Are theartisans, the share-croppers, the destitute, with us or against us?However, the political construction of class is most dramatically revealedin the repertoire of action each movement adopts – strikes, occupations,armed insurrection – and the fault-lines which follow from them. Finally,the protest embodied in class movements is not confined to issues suchas wage levels and living standards. Each of the movements articulatesaround a much wider critique of the existing social order, and containsa wider vision of what it is to be human and of how society might beorganised to create greater justice, equality or autonomy. In doing sothey have to address other kinds of identity – those involving gender,territory or religion for example – and incorporate them within the


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master narrative of class. Out of these wide-ranging critiques and visions,such movements generate political cultures, in part through addressingand reacting to rival political cultures: think of the impact of anarchismand Christian Democracy on Italian communism. I will elaborate onthese points as we go through the case material.

I have dealt only with movements which conducted a sustained attackon existing property rights and the state, but even within this morelimited range ‘the working class’ emerged as quite a variegated entity.There was the struggle of the urban industrial proletariat, but alsowidespread mobilisation in rural areas, amongst seasonal wage-labourers and share-croppers. In southern European regions themajority of the population lived and worked in rural areas until late inthe twentieth century (see Table 9.1 on p. 188). Many of those regionshad very radicalised and anti-clerical populations, and were majorstrongholds of revolutionary politics, contradicting stereotypes of ruralareas as traditional and conservative. Each movement had at its coreone group which formed the majority of the population and whosedemands dominated local politics, but they were never alone on thescene. Ethnography reveals, for example, the importance of economicoperators who, though technically self-employed, generated theirincome in the ambit of the major production centres: marketing,supplying, servicing. There were households of peasants, artisans andshopkeepers who gained part of their livelihood from seasonal wage-labour or as outworkers. These economic operators and mixed-incomehouseholds are not well captured by employment statistics, with the cat-egorisations of work they use (Smith 1991). The same problem applieseven more strikingly in the case of women, who often disappear fromofficial labour-force statistics: farm women, for example, who become‘housewives’ and ‘inactive’ in the censuses. Whole theories about stagesof capitalism and the emergence of post-Fordist and post-industrialsociety turn on the relative presence in the economy of groups who havemixed-incomes, or are ‘self-employed’, but sometimes on the basis of veryunreliable evidence.

At the most general level the radicalisation of these populations canbe attributed to the development of capitalism: changing property rights;concentration of the ownership of resources; enlarging markets; thedestruction of older forms of livelihood and their associated skills. At thesame time, we have to acknowledge both that other factors shaped thisradicalisation, and that people lost control over the conditions thatenabled them to gain a livelihood in a variety of ways. The result was nota simple economic category but a variety of economic figures, amongstwhom the classic industrial proletariat were a minority. In studies of

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politics in the ‘developing world’ it has often been pointed out that modelsof class struggle based on European industrial models are inappropriate,and the same argument can be extended to much of Europe itself. Theclass movements described were alliances, in at least two ways. Firstly,they built local alliances amongst this variety of economic figures,sometimes widened to include the self-employed or the unemployed anddestitute, sometimes excluding them. They were built in different waysaccording to social conditions and the political discourse whichinterpreted those conditions. Politics itself created processes of inclusionand exclusion and shaped the lines of class division. One of thosediscourses was Marxism, and we shall return to this point. Secondly, themovements built forms of solidarity and identification, translated intoco-ordinated action, between workers in different locations. No economicsystem ‘assembles’ people at any level above that of the production unit:the factory, mine or estate. Only politics can do that.

Mobilisation took place in the workplace and outside it: unions foughtover pay and conditions, and sometimes made more radical demandsover control in the workplace. This level of action was itself difficult toorganise, since employers did not recognise unions and allocated neithertime nor space for meetings. Unionism itself, moreover – whether basedon trade or sector – reproduced some of the lines of division of the organ-isation of production. It should also be stressed once again that there isno guarantee that sharing the same economic position – as factoryhands, estate workers, share-croppers – will generate either solidarity ora political movement. On the contrary, there were normally consider-able areas of competition and lines of division within these categories:between skill grades in a factory, between pueblos, or between estates. Itwas the work of the political movement, operating in a fracturedlandscape, to subordinate – or attempt to subordinate – these divisionsinto a larger political project.

Workplace mobilisation was vulnerable and limited unless linked towider political action outside work time and outside the workplace.Movements took root if activists created and maintained organisationalstructures appropriate to the specific economic and social environmentin which they operated. In Sesto San Giovanni, these were the social andpolitical circoli, and later the party section. In Andalusia, where therewere no stable employment contracts, and where there was a complexrelationship between the pueblo and the estates, it was the sindicato orcentro which organised both workplace and pueblo politics. In Tuscany,where there was most atomisation and no specific workplace, partyactivists built on existing patterns of socialisation, choosing strategicallylocated farmhouses where evening meetings of a circle of share-cropping


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families could be held. As mobility increased, the Casa del Popolo – builtand run by party members – became the political and social centre in thesmall provincial towns. They were remarkably successful both aschannels of communication and debate, and in creating the habits ofsolidarity amongst people from different social backgrounds. All thesemovements, from the workers’ libraries of Sesto to the anarchistnewspapers of Andalusia, generated an upsurge in literacy and inpublication.

This is the vital infrastructure: meeting places under the movement’scontrol, both furnished and resourced; newspapers, and later a wholebattery of other ways of communicating – the cyclostile machine, pho-tocopiers, loudspeakers – employed to generate an autonomous sourceof information which was very explicitly an alternative to that of the‘bosses’ or the state. It was this infrastructure which enabled a Bredafoundryman to meet those in the paint shop; or in the 1970s allowed thePCI to pull a million protestors onto the streets within 24 hours of a bomboutrage. Equally important was the way in which alliances wereconstructed between the dominant category of workers and othercategories (such as artisans or the unemployed) who were present in thelocality. The extent to which this happened, and how it happened,depended on the particular class discourse which articulated themovement, and on the way in which lines of cleavage (between skilledand unskilled workers, between share-croppers and labourers) werereinforced or mediated. All the movements involved some kind ofalliance, and some form of general strike was employed by all thesemovements at critical junctures, whatever their political labels. Shuttingdown all economic activity in a town – factories, workshops and shops– occupying the streets and challenging the capacity of the state tocontrol public spaces were all ways of constituting a movement throughaction, and creating alliances on a territorial basis.

The leadership of these movements was dominated by men. Womenmade up about one-third of the labour force in both the factories of Sestoand the Andalusian estates, and were an integral part of the workforceon Tuscan farms. They participated in workplace struggles and publicdemonstrations, but they very rarely broke through into leadership roleswithin the movements. The reasons for this are complex, and include theways in which waged employment and the identities which derive fromit are constructed in gendered ways, and mesh with domestic roles. Weshould also note that the key political forum was not the workplace butthe endless round of evening meetings in the sections and circoli: thehigher the responsibility, the wider and more time-consuming becamethe political round. This level of activism was normally incompatible with


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domestic obligations, which were in turn a consequence of the widergender order.

In all cases political mobilisation operated in at least two contexts: theworkplace and the local territory. It is worth underlining the fact that allthese class movements developed organisational forms based on territory– what have been called communities of resistance – and also attacheda great deal of importance to the control of local public spaces.Anarchism stressed territory more than the other movements: it was therights of a localised population to liberty and economic equality whichwere the purpose of the political movement. This is evident in the dualmeaning of the ‘pueblo’, which generated a particular conception of classand place. Beyond the social space of a town or district, class movementsoperated at the national level: their strategies were determined by theconflicts operating throughout a national territory, and by the strategicgoal of seizing or replacing the machinery of the central state. Again it isanarchism which is unusual, in that it developed loose federations to co-ordinate general strikes, but aimed to destroy the nation-state ratherthan constitute its government. There are important questions about theconnection between local and national objectives, and we can explorethis further in looking at the development of class discourse.

Living and working in polarised social environments characterised byhardship and subordination did not inevitably generate ‘class con-sciousness’. ‘If classes are to appear in politics they must be organised aspolitical actors. Again, political class struggle is a struggle about classbefore it is a struggle among classes’ (Przeworski 1977: 372, quoted inFoweraker 1989: 258). In other words the first political development isthe establishment of some version of a conceptual framework of class inan environment where there were always other ways of interpretingexperience. One alternative was an ethnic interpretation of social position,the crucial element which Gellner believed explained the presence ofsustained revolutionary movement, though strangely it is absent in thethree cases presented. However, there were other discourses circulatingin these social environments. Oppression or direct expropriation ofsurplus could be naturalised as part of a hierarchical order, and in thatcase class discourse was a rupture with organic models of society, as wesaw with the mezzadria. Alternatively they might be naturalised as part ofan inevitable disorder – society was a competitive jungle such that socialposition was experienced as the direct result of personal achievement orfailure. Even in the midst of class movements there were always some whofollowed other ways of affirming or denying human agency.

In the movements examined, class discourses contested the organicand competitive interpretations of society and provided an alternative


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view of the existence and history of social divisions, and sometimes oftheir connection with human nature; that is, they offered an under-standing of class belonging (of who ‘we’ are), and how society came to bestructured according to class. In doing so, they also articulated a radicalreversal of the normal, everyday understanding and experience of therelationship between the poor and the rich, the labourer and theemployer, suggesting that the lines of dependence in fact ran in theopposite direction, and that politics could turn the world upside down.The moral charge of a general strike derives from it being an act ofrevelation: it shows the world as it really is, and prefigures how it willbecome after a revolution.

Both popular and more abstract versions of these discourses existed,but rather than cover the whole field, I have concentrated on the partwhich constituted identity narratives, suggesting that these identitiesare best understood as complex, politically constructed narratives,defining boundaries and oppositions, positioning collectivities in socialprocesses, as well as in time and space. The most familiar, and the mostnarrowly defined, of these narratives was that which emerged amongstthe early industrial proletariat of northern Italy, and was heavilyinfluenced by Marxism. It interpreted capitalism as built increasingly ona mass of workers selling their labour – people who had no ‘past’, no skillsand no property, whose identity was defined around who they wouldbecome after the revolution. They represented the future, while the ranksof skilled labourers, who had a past in the tradition of artisan workpractices and mutualism, were counted as ‘property-holders’ andconsidered susceptible to ‘reformist’ economic demands and liberaldemocracy. This ‘purist’ line on the revolutionary commitment ofdifferent categories of workers was contested within the ItalianCommunist Party, and was not, in the long run, Gramsci’s own position(see Hall 1996). In political practice alliances were forged; however, therewas never any doubt that the proletariat was central, and that diversitywas interpreted in terms of a Janus-faced narrative positioned aroundthe revolution: the proletariat was the future; all other groups werebecoming more like the proletariat; after the revolution there would onlybe a proletariat.

Other movements may have had a conception of ‘those who work’ attheir core, but they were not necessarily built around a theory of wage-labour and the historic role of the proletariat. This emerged in thediscussions of the connections between work, the person and identityfound in the anarchist movement in Andalusia. Here, as in other ruralregions, the opposition was between those who did manual labour andthose who lived off the income of their properties, sometimes exhibiting


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an ostentatious disdain for getting their hands dirty. So the anarchistmovement was built around the field-workers, but operated mostly interms of a localised and inclusive dichotomy between the parasitic richand the working poor. It pitched labourers against landlords – both inrelation to employment, wages and conditions, and because it was thelandlords’ property rights which stood between the labourers and a justsociety. The struggle was widened through the pueblo sections to includeall those who did manual labour or aspired to an egalitarian society, andextended to an attack on all those who perpetuated authoritarianrelations and stood around with their hands idle, including the policeand the priesthood. It was the general strike which created the faultlinesof class relations, drawing in and polarising all the middle strata(artisans, peasants, muleteers) into the struggle over land.

What these comments suggest is that, politically, class is constitutedby the movement and its discourse. The movements interpret and buildon the divisions and configurations created by the economic processes ofa capitalist society; but once constituted they are also shaped by thedynamics of a purely political process. This is true both of ruling coalitions,and of the class movements which oppose them. We can elaborate on thisobservation through the third case study, that of Tuscany.

After 1945 the PCI maintained many features of the orthodoxcommunist tradition in its practice of democratic centralism and itscommitment to a revolutionary process which would achieve ‘the dic-tatorship of the proletariat’. But it was also a mass party, which mobiliseda far wider spectrum of the population than the proletariat, and soughtto achieve an electoral majority. The historic bloc which the PCIattempted to create was defined, primarily in economic terms, as all thoseopposed to ‘monopoly capitalism’, but as a political movement it operatedon a terrain where the central issues and lines of cleavage were definedrather differently. Italy’s strategic location in the Cold War, and the PCI’sreal and perceived subservience to the USSR, both ‘internationalised’domestic politics. On one side monopoly capitalism was partly identifiedwith American imperialism, while on the other those seeking itsoverthrow could be portrayed as aliens threatening the Italian nationand its cultural traditions. The class movement rapidly triggeredcompeting discourses about the Italian nation – discourses which werethemselves being reshaped by the Cold War. However, the most dramaticshift in the political terrain was generated by the Catholic Church. ThePCI tried intermittently for 30 years to create alliances with ruralproducers and middle strata who were politically organised by thechurch, but it encountered intransigence and failure. It was put firmly onthe defensive by a Catholic movement which represented the PCI as the


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enemy of liberty, the family, and all Christian values. The classmovement was reshaped around the competing national and moraldiscourses which constituted Catholic and communist worlds withinItalian society.

The international context is domesticated into the movement at manydifferent levels: it affects the strategic choices and resources available toa national leadership, but it also affects everyday politics in the workplaceand the streets. After all, actions like the Pope’s anathema againstcommunists, and the policy of exclusion which derived from it, were onlyeffective if they operated in the local context of villages and the urbandistricts, and the example of Cold War rhetoric in the last chapter wasdesigned to show this in operation. This brings us to the final point. Classdivides are embedded in sets of social and cultural differences, and in aneconomic system which includes many ‘intermediate’ positions, occupiedby operators who might be drawn to either side. In saying that class isconstructed by a movement and its discourse, we refer precisely toprocesses of interpretation, inclusion and exclusion, and also to theabsorption and modification of those social and cultural divides by themovement itself. In Tuscany the class movement developed in a societywhich contained long-standing and sharp divides between the urban andthe rural, the devout and the anti-clerical. It incorporated existingcultural discourses and oppositions: between the civilised and thenatural, autonomy and dependence, individualism and solidarity. Withina class movement we find interactions between organisational levels andcomplex transformations of existing social and cultural divisions.

We have seen how each of these movements relied on a territorialinfrastructure which was essential for generating activity and solidaritybetween categories of people who were not ‘assembled’ by relations inthe workplace, including all those who were not full-time wage-labourers. It was also clear that classic forms of action likedemonstrations and some versions of the general strike had as one oftheir ambitions the control of public space, challenging the normality orlegitimacy of governmental uses of force. This public space was also thearena for contesting everyday forms of power as manifested in rules ofconsumption and deference. Indeed, in the rural environments the attackon these customary forms of subservience – ‘creating men who castshadows’ – was considered an essential first step before political mobil-isation around property rights was possible. Here, in the literacycampaigns, and in the extensive critiques of Catholic teaching andpractise (including those on gender in the case of anarchism), we find amuch broader agenda than is commonly associated with class politics. Itincludes challenges to constituted authority in many fields of knowledge,


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and alternative understandings of power, morality and the person. It istrue that all these dimensions of power were formulated in terms of classrelations, and their solution seen as dependent on the abolition of existingproperty rights and the state that maintained them: this is what is meantby saying that class constituted a ‘master narrative’. It is also true thatthese movements were fundamentally involved in cultural struggles(although obviously not the whole range of cultural struggles), and if wecannot now see this it is because we have been blinkered by our owndefinitions of culture.

So far I have covered some of the issues involved in class construction:the interpretation of economic divisions, the effects of political action,and the wider political and cultural contexts. We can now turn brieflyto the issues of identity and morality. The term ‘identity’ is one of themost problematic in anthropology. Attacking it through the concept ofa narrative opens up the space to analyse similarities between class andother kinds of political movement, though there are many ways in whichsuch an analysis can be developed. Passerini’s work (1987; 1996), forexample, analysing a different kind of material – life-histories – opens upa very complex set of issues, and reveals both ruptures and continuitiesin the construction of personal identities, a point taken up again in theConclusion. Most of the discussion in the previous chapters has concen-trated on collective identities, partly because the construction ofsolidarity – ‘we’ – is so salient in class movements. This bounded collec-tivity is constructed in the workplace, in the town, and as an imaginedcommunity at national and international levels; it is an historicalconstruct reproduced over time through political cultures and institu-tions. It is also in many ways a highly moralised identity: the boundariesare moral boundaries, while within the anarchist or working-class‘cause’ there is an extensive ethical vocabulary of commitment,consistency and betrayal. This is the political identity I first encounteredin a Tuscan town in 1970, where every step of the way one could hear,‘Is he a comrade?’ (the answer – Si, e un compagno – could have half adozen different intonations).

The stress on collective narratives is also a reflection of the fact that, inthis political culture, individuals identified themselves with a collectiv-ity: they found themselves by recognising themselves in others.You veryrarely found the first person singular in a speech by a Communist Partypolitician. If a person broke with the movement, or the movement itselfcollapsed, this represented a loss of identity. This is echoed in Foweraker’scomments on the old guard communists during the post-Francotransition to democracy in Spain, ‘who struggled for liberty only to losetheir identity in the new freedom and find themselves without political


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meaning for the first time in their lives’ (Foweraker 1989: 169). If amovement collapses, or repudiates its previous objectives, then itsadherents lose the narrative within which they have previouslyinterpreted and valorised their lives. A commentator on the decline ofthe Italian left in the 1980s summarises the situation using terms whichare more commonly found in the context of ethnicity: ‘It was as if in thesedays an entire class had lost its own linguistic codes, its own culturaltraditions, its own political referents’ (De Luna 1994: 21).

The account of politics in Sesto San Giovanni suggested that thetranslation of economic processes into a moral drama is essential ingenerating revolutionary politics. This moral reading of existingeconomic relations is found in all three movements, and goes beyond aview that the state might intervene to ameliorate conditions; instead, thebasis of the whole existing system is seen as intrinsically exploitative,alienating, unjust or unfree. However, at this point we also need to makedistinctions. Marxism developed a theory of revolution and socialismwhich claimed scientific status, grounded in rationality and theuncovering of laws which demonstrated the historical role of theproletariat (Przeworksi 1977: 345). It stressed this intellectual heritageas a way of distancing itself from the political culture and practice ofanarchism, which was based on utopian visions and moral crusadesagainst injustice. Anarchism operated with a more generalised conceptof the poor and oppressed, partly because it emerged in environmentsless dominated by full-time wage-labour. This was reflected in its politicalpractice, often portrayed as spontaneous and undisciplined – a politicsof what ought to happen rather than of what is happening. We canpresent the distinctions between anarchism and ‘scientific socialism’ asinterconnected and comprehensive: in their claims to truth, in theirdefinitions of class and political strategy, and in their narratives of past,present and future. These differences are evident in the ethnographic andhistorical material we have examined. There is a connection, forexample, between the critique of the present and the issue of progress inthe revolutionary narrative – something which emerged in discussingthe ‘millennial’ temper of anarchism. But the differences also need to bequalified, since, in the everyday life of the movements, in Italy or Spain,the contrast is more blurred, with some convergence of people andobjectives. What they share is the view that a just society lies in thefuture, not in the past, and can only be achieved by revolution. This setsthem apart from both nationalist movements and most contemporaryEuropean politics. We can now turn to the death of class.

If class, in the sense employed here, is constructed politically, it canalso disappear. This does not imply that there has been an overall decline


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in the number of wage-labourers (they have grown in the service sector),or that the concentration of capital and power has diminished (it hasprobably increased). What declined in the second half of the twentiethcentury were European revolutionary class movements. Most of thepolitical parties which had articulated revolutionary ambitions hadbecome reformist, working for policies of redistribution and increasedwelfare provision while incorporated into the institutional practice of thestate and the management of the economy. They were often verysuccessful in their own terms – though frustration with reformism wasone of the factors which triggered the ‘new social movements’ after1968. Lumley (1990) has given us an exceptionally rich analysis of therevolutionary programmes and mobilisation of factory workers andstudents in Milan in 1969, but that moment passed.

The reasons for this overall decline constitute a problem which fallsoutside the scope of this book, although some of them can be mentioned.Politically, one of the most important is the most simple – revolutionarymovements were defeated. From Greece to Spain, Hungary to Italy, therepressive force of the existing states was able to crush them, usuallycreating authoritarian regimes and abolishing democracy in the process.Mazower (1998: 3) has noted that in the 1930s democracy survived onlyon Europe’s northern fringes. Secondly, where democracy survived orre-emerged it presented a serious dilemma to revolutionary movements.Strategies which included the pursuit of electoral majorities led to awidening of alliances, and a dilution of a revolutionary strategy with theproletariat at its core, while the fate of the parliamentary party itself cameto eclipse the movement which it represented. After the 1950s, thewidening gap between living standards in eastern and western Europe,and growing awareness of the evils of Soviet communism, led to the dis-crediting of the USSR as a model for western class movements.

Economic changes affected the social composition of Europeansocieties, creating what some have termed a post-industrial or post-Fordist society, though interpretations of this process have generatedvery sharp disagreements. Decentralisation or subcontracting in theproduction process was scarcely new: it had been normal for a long timein agriculture, construction and the textile industry (Narotzky 1997:215). What was important was the decline or relocation of massproduction in certain key sectors. As the Andalusian or Tuscan estatesempty, mines and shipyards close, and the big assembly plants aremechanised, there is a dispersal of the critical mass of workers aroundwhom a class movement is aggregated. The construction of a classmovement in those locales depended on a high level of activism outsidethe workplace, in a dense infrastructure of meeting-places and


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communication networks. One of the most striking social phenomenasince the 1960s has been the privatisation of leisure time, and especiallythe comprehensive diffusion of television. This not only dealt a seriousblow to traditional forms of activism, it propagated a very differentpolitical culture. With a few minor exceptions, the movements whichhad leapt on the opportunities offered by print singularly failed to gain afoothold in the new media.

It has been argued that there has been an accommodation to the wayproduction is organised. Workplace struggles concentrate on wage-levels– the distribution of the surplus, instead of control over production. Thisrepresents a trade-off, and with rising living standards energy switchesto achievement and identity construction in the field of consumptionrather than production. The interesting thing about this argument isthat it has been applied to much earlier periods than we have beenconsidering here. Bauman (1982) develops it in his analysis ofnineteenth-century England, and without entering into complexhistorical generalisations we can point to two themes in Bauman’s workwhich are relevant to the south European examples. Firstly, political rad-icalisation is very often produced by loss of autonomy in the sphere ofwork, loss of control over the labour process and the product. Accom-modation and the incorporation of the labour organisation into thecapitalist system ‘were accomplished through the economisation of theconflict ... [that is] the substitution of the wage-and-hours bargaining forthe initial conflict over control of the process of production and of thebody and soul of the producers’ (Bauman 1982: 100). Secondly, thenarrative of working-class identity is not monolithically about the future;it has within it, to a greater or lesser extent, precisely a memory of loss,and the desire to re-create a past condition of autonomy. We shall returnto this point in the Conclusion.

The end of class movements signifies the disappearance of that processof co-ordinating action between factories, localities and occupationalgroupings in order to achieve a society-wide socialist transformation.Movements which began as class movements can of course survive evenif their class discourses atrophy, and they transmute into something else.Sewell suggests that ‘While class discourse may commonly have beenmore durable than class institutions in the nineteenth century, classmovements have sometimes outlasted class discourse in the twentieth’(Sewell 1990: 73). In post-war Tuscany reforming and revolutionarystrands co-existed, but the overall construction of class identity around‘who we will become’ slowly gave way to an identity constructed arounda lengthening cultural tradition. In the celebration of the history of theparty and its leaders, the sense of class as a relationship – as oppositional


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– became less evident. Local movements in the workplace or in a unioncan also survive as forms of resistance, but when not harnessed into atransformative political project they may become an inturnedcorporatism – an uncoordinated struggle over wage-levels by isolatedgroups of employees. This kind of action has fed the assertion that classpolitics is about economics (in the restricted sense that Baumanidentifies), since, when a general and collective programme disappears,so too do all those mediations between local and national levels, and thecomplex transformations of existing social and cultural divisions. In thenext chapter we will turn to nationalist movements.


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6 THE BASQUE COUNTRY: MAKING PATRIOTS

In accounts of nationalist movements the analysis often seems to be atwar with itself, since the categories used in the writing appear to assumethe historical continuity and stability of nations, while the argumentitself is concerned to deny this. For that reason it is worth stating at thebeginning of this chapter the main premise which informs this argument,and the argument of many (though not all) of the sources from which itis drawn. There was no stable, bounded or homogeneous ethnic groupcalled the Basques who existed, awaiting nationalist leaders to mobilisethem in opposition to another stable, bounded and homogeneous nationcalled Spain. Instead, when at the end of the nineteenth century a Basquenationalist identity began to be articulated, the population of the Basqueprovinces demonstrated a high degree of heterogeneity with a series ofcross-cutting economic, political and cultural cleavages. There were noneat dichotomies, but a system of differences. What the Basque nation-alists did was to select out certain differences which served as ‘ethnicmarkers’ (and the selection varied over time), and weld them together.In welding them together they created something new, and it was neweven if some of the markers and cultural differences out of which it wasconstructed had existed for a long time within local society. What wasnew, viewed from the inside, was the affirmation of an ethnic group;viewed from the outside, it was a set of ethnicised social relations. Theserelations consolidated, evolved and transformed the face of political lifeboth within the Basque territories, and between those territories and therest of Spain. Nationalism presents itself boldly with nouns and essences:we need an analytical vocabulary of verbs and relations. The questiondriving this chapter is not ‘Who are these people, and what sets themapart?’, but that of the political process whereby certain economic andcultural differences, some of great antiquity, were constructed as ethnic.

This chapter is organised into two parts. The first and longest part dealswith ‘ethnogenesis’, the emergence of nationalist discourse and the con-solidation of ethnic boundaries in social and political life. The complexityof Basque history and the richness of the ethnography make this an ideal

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case study for the analysis of ethnicity in both its dramatic and itseveryday manifestations, and for the exploration of ways in which thesignificance of cultural differences is embedded in economic and socialrelations. This part will start with an account of development in theBasque provinces, up to and including the rapid industrialisation ofVizcaya at the end of the nineteenth century. This leads into anexamination of the emergence of nationalism at the turn of the centuryamongst the urban middle classes, looking at both identity discoursesand the range of activities and organisations which constituted thenationalist movement itself. Attention then switches to rural society. Atthe beginning of the century Basque nationalism, although built arounda rural ideology, was seen by most rural people as an urban invention,at odds with their view of their own trajectory; 50 years later it hadentered and ordered their conceptions and practices.

The violent repression suffered by the Basque people during the CivilWar and its aftermath led eventually to some significant innovations inthe political directions and strategy of the nationalist movement, andspecifically to the emergence of ETA. The second part of this chapter dealswith the revolutionary ambitions of Basque nationalism, and examinestwo further themes: the effect of violence on political mobilisation, andthe attempt to combine class and ethnic politics.

PART ONE: NATIONALIST DISCOURSE AND ETHNIC BOUNDARIES

From Foralism to Industrialisation

In the sixteenth century, at the height of its glory, Spain’s ruler was calledKing of the Spains: a recognition of the diversity of both the colonies (theNetherlands, the Americas), and of the regions which made up theIberian peninsular. Spain was plural, and there were many ways of beingSpanish. By no means the least of them was to be Basque, since thisnorthern mountainous area had never been incorporated into theMoorish Kingdoms, and formed one of the strongholds from whichdeveloped the Christian Reconquest. The acclaimed attributes of thepeople from this region – ‘Strong in arms, pure in blood, steadfast inreligion’ – made them paragons of Spanish virtue. The provinces claimedby the Basque nationalists in the twentieth century (four in Spain, threein France) at no time constituted a political unit with its own centraladministration. Partly as a result the language, Euskera, remaineduncodified, an oral language of often mutually unintelligible dialects usedonly by the rural population and by the lower clergy.


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If the provinces had never constituted a political entity as such, thepeople who lived there did maintain or acquire certain distinctive politicalrights. One of these was the recognition that the people of the provinceshad ‘collective nobility’: because they had never been contaminated byMoorish or Jewish settlement they had pure blood lines, and hence wereeligible for office in the church and the state without the need todemonstrate individual pedigree. Secondly there were the fueros,‘collections of local laws and customs together with specific economicand political immunities underwritten by the Kings of Castile (and laterof Spain) in return for political allegiance to the monarchy’ (Heiberg1989: 20). There were no standardised fueros for the Basque provinces;they were written in Spanish, and the existence of local statutes wasgeneral throughout Spain (and much of Europe). However, the fueros ofthe Basque country gave more extended rights, created greater localautonomy, and lasted longer, than those of other Spanish regions.

The major line of cleavage within the Basque provinces was betweenrural and urban society. The classic representation of Basque ruralsociety was of an independent peasantry, occupying a small farmstead(basseria), practising impartible inheritance, largely self-sufficient butalso reliant on access to considerable areas of church and communalland. But this generalised picture needs substantial qualification: firstly,in that it holds more for the mountainous northern provinces of Vizcayaand Guipazcoa than for the drier inland province of Navarra, where adifferent agrarian regime operated: secondly, in that there had existed asubstantial market in land for many centuries, and a notable oscillationbetween periods when land was concentrated in a few hands and themajority of the farmers were tenants, and those periods when ownershipwas more widespread. The farmstead may have generally beenindivisible, and a symbol of continuity, but its ownership was not. Therewere tensions within rural society between landlords and peasants, andby the mid-eighteenth century there emerged a first defence of certainsocial and cultural principles in the work of a Jesuit called Larramandi,who lauded the purity, nobility, austerity and egalitarianism of hard-working peasants. This was not a description of the actually existingrural society, since in 1750 the powerful and parasitic landlordsdominated; it was a eulogy to how things should be.

The non-inheriting sons and daughters of the basserias moved intothe towns, or down to the fishing and whaling communities on thecoast, or emigrated to the Americas. Basque urban settlements (villas)were military and commercial centres, organising part of the tradebetween Castile, Europe and the New World. They contained their ownprofessional middle classes and were also centres for artisan production,

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including that based on the timber and iron of Vizcaya, though the foralregime prevented its export. The prosperous families of these centresalso periodically invested in land, and they conducted all their businessin Spanish.

Both sectors of Basque society were transformed by the two Carlistwars (1833–39, 1872–76) which were triggered by a conflict over thesuccession to the Spanish throne, but involved a complex of social forceswithin Spanish society. Generally, the forces of liberalism and urbansociety were in opposition to those favouring a rural, decentralised Spainunited around the monarchy and a strong, purified church. Liberalismwon, and the settlements of 1878 consolidated the trend of the previousdecades. As we saw in the discussion of Andalusia, both communal andchurch lands had been sold off, hitting both the clergy and the peasantry,a situation aggravated by the abolition of the fueros and the establish-ment of a regime which taxed land and livestock more than industry.Administration and public order became more centralised, while allcustoms posts were moved to Spain’s national frontiers, and a very highprotective tariff system put in place.

The result, especially in Bilbao and Vizcaya, was one of the fastestperiods of industrial growth seen anywhere in Europe. British capitalwas invested in the iron mines, both for export and for local industry.This growth created a sprawling industrial landscape of mines, blastfurnaces, engineering works and shipyards, with the labouringpopulation lodged in company barracks, suffering low pay, overcrowd-ing and frequent epidemics.

At the end of the nineteenth century the Basque provinces containeda great variety of social circumstances and political aspirations. The ruralareas untouched by industrialisation were home to a population of smallfarmers, mostly Basque-speaking, staunchly Catholic, and struggling toadjust to the loss of communal land rights and the new marketconditions. An industrial oligarchy ruled in Bilbao: the bulk of the ironand steel industry, and the flourishing banking sector, were in the handsof half a dozen families. They controlled the local political machine, buttheir immense power was exerted primarily on the national stage, sincethey were major players in Madrid’s liberal government circles, and ableto shape Spain’s economic policies. Next there was a rapidly growingurban proletariat, which was internally divided. Those recruited fromthe rural hinterland tended to cluster in the smaller firms, while thosewho had migrated from other regions of Spain formed the majority of theworkforce in the mines and steelworks, and also dominated the lowerranks of the local administration. These migrant workers created one ofthe first and most militant socialist movements in Spain. The socialist


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PSOE was founded in 1890 in Bilbao, which became the centre of a seriesof violent general strikes over the next 20 years.

Between the oligarchy and the proletariat existed various middlestrata. In the industrial boom after 1876,

smaller firms were absorbed or driven out of business by the large industrialcombines. The decline of this sector of Basque leadership was reflected in the shiftof their sons from industry into the professions. They were lawyers and doctors,journalists and teachers, artists, composers and writers, the providers of services,such as transportation, communication, design and planning. They were thesecond generation of the industrial boom. (Clark 1979: 38, quoted in Conversi1997: 56)

They were the losers in the transformations which had swept throughthe Basque provinces. Their economic space was eroded by the industrialand financial giants which had emerged in Bilbao, and by the abolitionof the foral regime and the status of ‘free-trading’ zone which theprovinces had enjoyed. Their political role was reduced by the oligarchy’slocal and national control, while their livelihoods were threatened bythe possible encroachment of militant socialism into the smallerworkshops run with labour from the rural hinterland. Carlism was areduced force and belonged to the past; the liberal revolution was thecause of their present problems, while socialism was the future threat totheir interests. They needed a political project, and they created theBasque nationalist movement.

The First Stages of the Nationalist Movement

Sabino de Arana (1865–1903), the founder of this movement, wastypical of this generation and background. He was born into a Catholicfamily in Bilbao, industrialists whose fortunes had suffered from theiridentification with the defeated Carlists. The starting point for under-standing this movement has to be the sense of loss which men like Aranaexperienced when contemplating their own fortunes and the kind ofsociety that was emerging so rapidly around them in the 1890s. The darksatanic mills of Bilbao and their associated squalor had eaten up thebasseria’s rural hinterland, creating a booming city of migrants: only 20per cent of the population was born in Bilbao, while nearly half camefrom distant regions of Spain. Euskera as a language had disappeared inthe city, while even in the rural areas it was declining fast, with the intro-duction after 1878 of primary schools teaching in Spanish (Heiberg1989: 46). For men in Arana’s position none of this represented progress:the challenge was to understand what had been lost, how it had beenlost, and how it might be resurrected. He developed a complex vision to


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understand and respond to these processes, a vision which involved thefusion of Catholicism and the concept of a people, a race.

Catholicism is fundamental to Basque nationalism in all periods. In the1890s it provided Arana with a powerful interpretation of the evils ofcontemporary society. The Papal Encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’ of 1891 isthe foundation stone of Catholic social doctrine, setting out thetheological roots of modern Error and their disastrous social conse-quences. It denounces the values of liberalism and of the misery andinjustices created by capitalism, and denounces those who oppose theseinjustices through socialism. Both parties to the modern conflict fall intothe errors of materialism and Godlessness. Catholic social doctrineadvocated a middle path, a more egalitarian society, with widespreadproperty-holding, based in families with their own patriarchal authority,sanctified by God. Small family businesses were the best building blocksof society, to be buttressed by voluntary associations like guilds and co-operatives. Here, and in later elaborations, the autonomous family isrealised best amongst the peasantry, whose experience brings them closerto God, since their lives are subject to the laws of nature and not of man.

Basque nationalism included all these elements of Catholic socialdoctrine: the moral and intellectual leadership of the church; a violentopposition to the liberal state and an even more abiding one to socialism;a denunciation not of industrialism per se but of ‘bad’ industrialism, withits concentrations of wealth and poverty; the centrality of the peasantryin a moral society. All this is characteristic of emerging forms of EuropeanChristian Democracy, and could have been subsumed into it. But therewere specific local problems, and a ‘loss’ which could not be addressedby a pan-Spanish political project. The evils of Bilbao were a direct resultof the defeat of the Carlist cause and the fueros: a system of local self-government associated with a hard-working, God-fearing peasantry.Regaining these rights from the Spanish state would be a necessary partof the resurrection, while the ills of industrial growth and socialism werelinked directly to migration. The concept of the Basques as a distinctpeople emerged as a second organising concept alongside aspirations fora particular kind of society, and was fused with Catholicism in thedeveloping nationalist ideology.

The notion that the Basques were a separate people was not a given.At the elite level Basques had played important roles in the Spanishchurch and state for centuries: not just participating as a minorityamongst a pre-constituted Spanish majority, but playing a significantpart in that process whereby Spain itself had been constituted. There areindications (Conversi 1997: 46 and sources) that Arana and his brothercame to this nationalist conception not as something obvious, but


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initially as a troublesome deduction from the fact that they wanted forthe Basque provinces something (the foral regime) which the rest ofSpain had rejected. At first Arana’s energies were concentrated on theproblems of Vizcaya province and the case for its independence; thenthey broadened to include all the Basque provinces. Even when theconcept of a Basque nation had been consolidated ideologically, thereremained the constitutional question of whether the rights of the Basquepeople could be realised within a Spanish federation or required inde-pendence. Amongst Arana’s early supporters, and throughout the next100 years, regional and separatist aspirations co-existed within thenationalist movement.

The Basque people constituted a race: a group defined in the firstinstance by biological descent. Race as a concept is diachronic, requiringan historical time-frame: the identification of ancestors who had thesame characteristics as those found today, who had reproducedthemselves by marriage within the group, and not introduced‘impurities’ by marrying out. Once the premises are accepted, thearguments linking identity, purity and continuity become self-confirming, and tautological. Scientific conceptions of race and culturewere very widespread in nineteenth-century European intellectualcircles, and were picked up in nationalist movements, but Arana couldalso draw on sources embedded in local thought and practice. Thehistoric status of ‘collective nobility’ granted to the Basque people had atits heart all the essential connections: an unconquered homeland, pureblood lines and hence uncontaminated Catholic faith. Under the foralregime, noble status had been used in certain periods to prevent thesettlement of migrants. Local naming and inheritance practicescontinued to stress continuity and unbroken bloodlines. Biologicalresearch on blood groups and skull shapes, and philological research onthe antiquity of Euskera, provided a discursive framework for local under-standings of identity and ancestry.

Of course, positing the existence of a pure Basque race (as opposed toan impure Spanish one) does not tell you immediately who is part of it,and who is not. The movement needed criteria for inclusion or exclusion,and neither residence in the provinces nor language would do this. Inthe early years membership of the Basque Nationalist Party was madeconditional on possessing four Basque surnames, since they demon-strated purity at least to the male great-grandparents, and surnamescontinued to act as immensely important markers over the followingcentury. However, a political movement needs a collective imagery, asense of who ‘we’ are, fleshed out with some social and cultural charac-teristics. If the only answer is to go down the street asking people their


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great-grandparent’s surname, we have a rather pedantic and impover-ished basis for launching a grand vision. Here again the peasantry cameto the rescue. The urban centres, whether the steel towns or the old villas,could not offer the essential imaginary – they were too heterogeneous,and full of people who had migrated and intermarried. Only the ruralworld of the basserias offered an image of continuity and unequivocalBasqueness: you knew without asking. The peasants themselvesremained largely indifferent to the nationalist movement for anothergeneration, but they provided the cultural themes which were essentialfor its articulation.

I have suggested that the core of Basque nationalism lay in Catholicismand racism, which fused and subtly altered each other. The main reasonfor seeking separate development was to allow Basques to practice theirCatholicism away from the corrupting influence of liberal Spain andGodless socialism. Nations constituted extended families and had beencreated by God; each nation formed its own relationship to God, prayedto him and communicated with him separately (Heiberg 1989: 53). Ifeach nation has a unique relationship to God, it is an easy step to seeingthe Basques as having a special relationship to him, being a chosenpeople, and elements of such a view can be found.

Arana’s religious beliefs were condensed into his notion of Jaungoikua, a criticalemblem of the nationalist doctrine. The Basque word for ‘God’, or, literally, ‘Lordon high’, Jaungoikua, was the fountain of all sacred and worldly authority insidethe Basque country. But implicitly, Jaungoikua was an exclusive God. He was theGod of the Basques and, as such, provided an autonomous framework forreligion. (Heiberg 1989: 54)

There was also theological speculation about the antiquity of Euskera:was it the language common to mankind before the Tower of Babel,spoken in the garden of Eden, spoken by the Creator himself? (Conversi1997: 64). In this environment, even God could be ethnicised. Theseideas represented more extreme tendencies, and should not obscure themore general point that Catholicism was central to the conception of theBasque nation, and enriched its cultural definition and celebration, sothat, for example, Easter Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, was chosenas the Day of the Fatherland, a national holiday.

The relationship between the Basque race and God is a more centralissue even than language and territory, at least in this period. Aranaargued that the patria could not be measured by the territory it occupied,and would still be Euskeria ‘even if it were moved to an island in thePacific’ (quoted in Heiberg 1989: 52). Similarly, ‘if our invaders learntEuskera we would have to abandon it … and dedicate ourselves to


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speaking Norwegian or some language unknown to them’ (Heiberg1989: 53). These were rhetorical flourishes, designed to stress the gulfbetween the Basque people and all others: it did not mean that languageand territory were not important – indeed, they would become more soin the twentieth century.

Arana and his colleagues devoted immense energy to documentingand promoting that rural culture which had been lost to the Spanish‘invasion’. The first priority was Euskera, which none of the early nation-alists spoke. They learned it, attempted to purify it, wrote grammars anddictionaries, and developed a publishing industry which used it. Theyfounded and co-ordinated circles dedicated to the study of rural culture,and in the early decades of the twentieth century they threw themselvesinto the organisation of music festivals, dances, oral poetry competitions,games and other folkloristic practices of peasant life. They organisedmountaineering clubs, with Sunday excursions into the sacralisedmountains, clubs which later became the basis for the armed militias. AsHeiberg argues, all this activity did not constitute any simple celebrationor resurrection of a threatened rural way of life. It was instead a process,organised largely by and for middle-class urban people, which selectedout those aspects of rural life, and those rural attributes, which wouldact as ethnic markers. That is, they celebrated a set of cultural activitieswhich would provide the lines of inclusion and exclusion inBasque–Spanish relations.

So far we have dealt with the discourse which constructed the Basquesas a nation, and the use made of rural culture in the construction ofethnicity by the urban middle class. But delimiting ethnic categories isnot the same thing as building a nation, which is achieved by the politicalwork of a movement generated around a discourse. It involves the con-struction of new lines of social cleavage through exclusionary practice;the interpretation in ethnic terms of selected existing lines of cleavage;and the permeation of the ethnic discourse into the understanding ofrelations and activities. Of course, much of the work generating ethniccategories – the language revival, the publication industry, the culturalstudy circles – themselves generated social environments and newsystems of communication linking nationalists together. The movementgrew in the early twentieth century through the proliferation of neworganisations, which took root in a variety of social contexts and linkedthe Basque provinces.

The Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) was established in 1895 as afederation of community nationalist clubs called batzokis, active in boththe Basque provinces and amongst the Basque diaspora in the Americas(Heiberg 1989: 70). The PNV established a youth branch in 1901,


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principally amongst students, and a nationalist labour union in 1911,which was active amongst the white-collar employees and the ruralmigrants employed in the smaller factories. There was also a verysuccessful Association of Patriotic Women. The movement quicklygained the enduring support of the lower clergy – not surprising giventhe centrality of Catholicism in the nationalist project, and the attackson the church from liberalism and socialism. The PNV enabled the clergyto embrace an activist role in relation to Basque rural culture, and beginthe work of creating an educational system in Euskera.

These and other organisations formed the ‘infrastructure’ of thenationalist movement, a sufficiently dense network of organisations ‘tocreate a parallel society in which the abertzale, the true Basque, couldoperate in most spheres of public life closed off from the outside, theanti-Basque world’ (Heiberg 1989: 73). Nationalists had to turn race(or ethnic identity) into a politically operative category, implying thatdescent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the ascriptionof ‘Basqueness’. True Basques were patriots (abertzale) whose politicaland moral commitment to their race showed through their actions, andled them to live their lives within the ‘parallel society’ which had beenconstructed. As we shall see later, this implies that the focus of politicalactivity was not the fight with the Spanish state for independence, somuch as a struggle with other political forces for power and hegemonywithin the Basque provinces. The PNV eventually decided to contestelections, and Arana himself was elected to the Vizcayan provincialgovernment in 1898. There were periods of electoral growth anddecline, but by 1930 the PNV had re-emerged as a well-organised thirdforce in the provinces, even if its support was very uneven. It wasstrong in Bilbao and the rest of Vizcaya, where it came second to thesocialist bloc; it was virtually absent in Alava and Navarra outside theprovincial capitals.

The early social base of the PNV was created, in Heiberg’s terms, outof the fusion of two rather different social groups: an urban manufac-turing middle class, pragmatically seeking greater regional autonomywithin Spain, and a radicalised petty-bourgeoisie with separatistaspirations. The programmatic differences between these two sectors isnot surprising, since manufacturers and shopkeepers tend to have ratherdifferent economic horizons. There were feuds and changes in policy, butoverall the movement held together, and the existence of twoprogrammes within one party allowed it to widen its base, whichincluded many of the clergy, the intelligentsia, and the professionalmiddle classes. It also gained some ground amongst the urban workingclass, whose social roots lay in the rural Basque hinterland. Then, from


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the 1920s, the PNV began to put down roots in the rural hinterland itself– a vital development in the consolidation of the nationalist movement.The next section will analyse the impact of the nationalist movementwhen it finally penetrated the rural areas, and uses this ethnography toexplore the whole question of national consciousness.

Nationalists and the Peasantry

The village of Elgeta studied by Heiberg is on the boundary betweenVizcaya and Guizpazcoa, and had about 1,000 inhabitants at the turnof the century, composed almost entirely of farming households. Therewere just over 100 farms, mostly run by tenants, with rents fixed in kindand paid to landlords, some absentee, some local. It was a largelyunmonetised economy, with considerable poverty, but one of substantialcultural homogeneity, since farmers, tenants and their local landlordsall shared a rural way of life and spoke Euskera (Heiberg 1989: 72). Thekey issue in local politics was not ‘Basqueness’ but the role of landlords:their manipulation of indebtedness to extract surpluses from tenantfarmers and to maintain their position as Carlist bosses (jauntxoch) atelections to the village councils.

During the First World War a booming armaments industry in anearby town spread new economic opportunities into the ruralhinterland. Wealthier landlords sold off some of their farms to the tenantsand invested their capital in industrial enterprises. Employment infactories and commerce increased in the local area, but such jobsrequired the acquisition of Spanish. The schooling system expanded andthere arose a much more widespread pattern of bilingualism, so thatdifferent parts of the economy were conducted in different languages.These were also correlated with generation and kinship status, sincefinancing an education (in Spanish) became one of the ways of ‘payingoff’ the non-inheriting heirs of the farmstead. Roads were built andcommercial life expanded, creating new occupational categories:shopkeepers, barkeepers, traders, teachers. Throughout the 1920s‘modernity’ penetrated the Basque countryside in the form of money,bureaucracy, literacy and Spanish.

Attempts by the PNV to penetrate the rural world prior to 1914 werea failure; in fact, Heiberg’s brief comments (1989: 68) suggest a wonderfulcomedy of manners. Nationalist activists and intellectuals would emergefrom the city, dressed in neat imitations of peasant attire, speaking(presumably) a very rudimentary form of Euskera, and totally ignorantof the hard parameters of rural existence. They held meetings to extol thepeasants as noble savages, pure custodians of a threatened culture, but


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they mostly ended up having lunch with the priest and a few local pro-fessionals, who were perhaps the only people they could understand.

A decade later the political climate began to change. The majority ofthe rural population wanted their children to have a Spanish education,jobs in factories, and Spanish-speaking marriage partners. But theeconomic changes had created new lines of cleavage within local society.The eldest son, who inherited the basseria, was now locked into a staticand relatively disadvantaged way of life, and often had trouble finding awife. The non-inheriting siblings gained an education and employmentin a more prosperous urban environment, and the effect was to reverseone of the basic tenets of the rural kinship system. The cleavage wasbetween the rural world of farmsteads and the new urban world of flats,jobs and education which was emerging in the villages, and which fellwithin the orbit of a larger urban and commercial world. Heiberg insiststhat the division was one between a Basque rural and a Basque urbanculture, that the population of both worlds had local and Euskera-speaking origins, and that there was no in-migration at this stage. Shealso argues that few people in the local area had the slightest interest inthe relationship between the Basque provinces and the rest of Spain.

The PNV, which continued its proselytising mission during the sevenyears of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, began to make some convertsin the village, and its support became clear when elections were heldagain in 1930 – firstly amongst the farmers, the basseritarak. The movefrom tenancy to ownership had cut many free from patronage ties to theCarlist landlords, and in addition the PNV had emphasised a rural,Catholic programme of land-ownership and credit facilities aimed atimproving farmers’ welfare. PNV-sponsored cultural activities alsoprovided new forms of recreation in the village and appealed to localyouth. The nationalist appeal to other sectors was more complex. Manyfactory workers and small entrepreneurs had turned to the socialist andrepublican parties, which established a nucleus of support in the village.Other members of Basque urbanised society had their progress blockedby the ostracism perpetrated against migrants from poor, rural, Euskera-speaking backgrounds. The PNV found converts in this sector too, and inthe early 1930s constituted the largest political bloc – and the moralmajority – within the village.

The PNV had constructed its nationalist discourse around the figure ofa pure, devout, Euskera-speaking male peasant, inhabiting amountainous rural arcadia. When the rural villages were indeedpopulated by Catholic, monolingual, Euskera-speaking subsistencefarmers it made few converts. When the penetration of the Spanish stateand capitalism had effected a rupture in that rural continuity and


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produced greater economic and cultural heterogeneity; when the pre-eminence of the basseritarak had been undermined; when the church forthe first time found itself with local enemies in the form of socialism –then the Basque nationalist movement found more fertile ground.

It is not obvious that the PNV would have maintained its hegemonyin a local society that was moving so fast along divergent economic andcultural trajectories. The Civil War that erupted in 1936 changedeverything. It split the Basque provinces down the middle. CarlistNavarra rose in support of Franco, while the nationalist insurgents andthe industrial working class of the coast supported the Republic. The PNVitself was caught in the middle: was it better to support the Catholic butcentralising nationalists, or the left, which was Godless but morepragmatic on autonomy? A narrow majority of the PNV sided with theRepublic and went down fighting. The reprisals carried out against thelosing side in the Basque provinces were brutal, and although perhaps asmaller proportion of the population was killed than in Andalusia, thiswas combined with very repressive measures against Basque nationalistaspirations. Those threatening the unity of Spain, like the lower Basqueclergy, were treated very harshly. The use of Euskera was prohibited inpublic places, in names and inscriptions. The defacing of gravestones wasa disturbing instance of tactics which became more systematic andgeneralised in Balkan ‘ethnic cleansing’. The Franco regime stamped themovement into the ground, but in so doing also provided confirmationthat there was a distinctive Basque culture, and that its existence was athreat to Spanish unity. Acts of barbarism, like the bombing of Guernica,confirmed the popular legitimacy of those who upheld the cause.

In the late 1950s and 1960s a renewed and more militant form ofBasque nationalism grew up in the seminaries and amongst the studentbody, and this will be examined in the last part of this chapter. First weneed to examine an important and prior theme: the way in whichnationalist discourse and practice became embedded in a pattern of socialrelations, so that everyday life was self-evidently a manifestation of adistinctive ethnicity. I shall use Heiberg’s ethnography (1989: Chapter9), looking first at forms of association and community.

Rural social relations featured two forms of voluntary associationwhich created patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The first – auzoak –was a loose linkage of neighbouring farmsteads which co-operated inlabour exchanges on individual farms, and on collective tasks such asroad-building. These linked neighbours also attended each other’sweddings, funerals and baptisms, and maintained a private chapel withits patron saint. It was an enduring relationship between householdscombining principles of autonomy and reciprocity. Hard-working,


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competent farmers, with a common knowledge of production techniquesand landscape, shared labour and resources in a pattern of personalisedand balanced reciprocity. The egalitarian ethic co-existed withsubstantial inequalities, which were transmuted into debt relations andpatronage; nevertheless it is apparent that the egalitarian ethic did havesome effect on the actions of patrons, and was one of the reasons whythey failed to crystallise into a distinct social elite.

The second form of voluntary association was the caudrillas, whichorganised social life outside the sphere of domestic relations and work.They were predominantly male associations, involving 8 to 20individuals, generally of the same age, marital status and lifestyle, hencesharing a common daily timetable. A caudrilla did things together, forexample meeting twice each day, for a drink before lunch and supper. Itmight be formed round a special interest in fishing or hunting; whateverits purpose, its members organised banquets and ate together. It provideda support group for the individual, and organised social and culturalevents for the village. The caudrillas were structured by inclusion andexclusion, they ‘were closed, exclusive social units. Gaining entry into acaudrilla once it had solidified was very difficult. The most importantelement for late membership was gaining the confidence of existingmembers. And trust was not a commodity bestowed lightly’ (Heiberg1989: 156). Once you were in, there was an egalitarian ethic ofimmediate and balanced reciprocity, and of trust: information andopinions could be shared and would not flow out of the group.

Having sketched these two important associational forms, it becomeseasier to deal with the pueblo, a term which, as in other parts of Spain,has two meanings: a place (and all those who live there), and a moralcommunity. It is the gap between these two concepts which leads to theemergence of a particular social and moral map. As a moral entity, thepueblo consists of all those who show in their behaviour that theysubscribe or adhere to certain values. These may vary over time, butwould include those values (equality, honour, prudence, modesty andhard work) which are embedded in the associations. Hence, conceivedas a collectivity, the moral pueblo consists of all those who demonstratethose values, in the context of the auzoak or the caudrillas.

The physical map of the pueblo is made up of what Heiberg representsas four concentric circles, based on gradations of inclusion and exclusion.At the core is the moral pueblo. Outside that, in a second circle, are thosewho have breached local norms – for example of reciprocity, trust orcollective endeavour – and are subject to either temporary isolation orirreversible ostracism. Such people are ‘us’ – those from inside – butmorally lapsed. In the next circle are those from outside, professionals


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such as teachers and doctors who are resident in the village but comefrom elsewhere and are not included in circles of labour exchange orlong-term sociability. The outer circle consists of those who are not usand are dangerous, a threat to the pueblo and its moral life – archetyp-ically the civil guard, and after the Civil War the police informer: chivato.Heiberg suggests that chivatos share many of the moral attributes ofwitches (see also a long discussion in Zulaika 1988).

Ethnicity is not a synonym for culture. Ethnicity, in modern usage, isthe property of an ethnic group, a people who consider themselvesbounded and distinct, on the basis of criteria such as race, religioustradition or language, and who (the circle turns) possess a commonculture. Almost any aspect of culture can be incorporated into an ethnicdiscourse, but the discourse itself is inevitably selective, and does notcover the whole of, or all aspects of, the cultural life of those who formpart of the ethnic group. The point becomes clearer if we present the issuethe other way round, adapting the perspective of the early nationaliststhemselves: that there existed a Basque race, and that all those with acertain genealogy (or surname) belonged to it. Basque culture is thus theculture of those who belong to the Basque race. This presents a mind-numbing problem of incoherence. Some members of the Basque racespoke Euskera, some Spanish; some were bankers devoted to highfinance, others Jesuits devoted to spiritual exercises; some were farmerswith their flutes, some were church-burning leftists – and that is beforewe consider the American diaspora. So a selection had to be made: someways of being Basque were purer and more authentic than others, anda narrative was constructed which explains why certain ways of beingBasque in the present are truer, because they are continuous with thepast. For reasons examined earlier, the choice made by the nationalistswas to prioritise the peasantry, and peasant culture and values came toepitomise the Basque race.

Outside the nationalist perspective, there is nothing strikinglydistinctive about the social forms of the Basque peasantry describedabove. The ethnography of rural Europe is full of accounts of labour-exchanging neighbours, drinking circles, hunting parties, distinctionsbetween insiders and outsiders, closed or tacit systems of knowledge andmoral communities. In fact, the group of Sussex University graduatesorganised by Professor Bailey to study European mountain villages, fromthe Pyrenees to the Austrian Alps, devoted several books to theethnography of reputation, honour, trust, autonomy and equality (Bailey1971; 1973). The associational forms may be slightly more ‘crystallised’in the Basque villages – and there was the additional issue of diglossia –but in all mountain regions there was a substantial gulf between local


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patois and the dominant language of the state. But the similaritiesbetween Basque and other peasantries were of no interest to urbannationalists – they were not attempting to construct a Spanish peasantmovement, let alone a Green International like the politicians of theBalkan agrarian parties between the wars.

When in the 1920s the PNV broke through in the rural districts, theydid so by capturing the economic, political and above all moral centre ofthe pueblo. They had developed a programme aimed at the basseritarak;they used forms of political organisation and mobilisation which nestedinto the caudrillas, and provided a discourse which interpreted all the keyvalues of the pueblo – embedded in everyday social practice – as attributesof the Basque people. In that way everything done by the core ‘moralcommunity’ of the pueblo was an affirmation of Basque ethnicity. Havingcaptured farming households at the core, support for the nationalistmovement spread out into the pueblo – but not completely. It reinter-preted old and new lines of social cleavage as boundaries of the nation;thus the local landlords with their authoritarian ways were enemies ofthe Basque nation, as were the emerging factory workers with theirGodless–Spanish–socialist beliefs. The internal divisions of local societywere essential to the operation of the movement. Finally, we should notethat the PNV affirmed the values and importance of this rural way of lifeprecisely when the position of the basseritarak, and the central place ofpractices based on continuity and inheritance, were being subverted bynew economic conditions. This is why so many analysts, whether or notthey use the conceptual vocabulary of tradition and modernity, linknationalism to the phenomenon of transition.

In the period of reconstruction after the Civil War, and throughout theFranco period, the Basque provinces (except Navarra) suffered culturalrepression combined with very rapid economic and demographicgrowth. A state policy of economic autarky created a second wave ofindustrialisation which, although fragile in the long term, transformedthe previously untouched rural areas, including Alava and Navarra. Asa result villages like Elgeta began to experience for the first time theimpact of migration from other regions of Spain. Its social infrastructure,built out of long-term patterns of reciprocity, could not absorb migrants,the distinction between ‘those from here’ and ‘those from outside’strengthened, and as migrant numbers grew, so did outright hostility.

In the 1960s and 1970s local society became increasinglysegregated. The caudrillas tightened and became more exclusive, partlyas a response to political oppression. They transformed themselves intosociedad (clubs), sought lockable premises where they could talk and eatin private, and turned down all requests by migrants to become


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members. Some later provided the terrain in which ETA activists andsupporters operated. Village bars were largely abandoned by the localpopulation, and were frequented by outsiders. Intermarriage wasextremely rare. Migrants tended to find employment in the factories,while local people worked on the farms or industrial co-operativeswhich were created as a more egalitarian alternative to the factories,on the Basque model of Mondragon. The church organised separateservices in Euskera and Spanish. The most significant development wasthe establishment by a young priest of an ikastola – a school funded byprivate donations – which would teach local children in Euskera. In the1960s there was considerable scepticism about the educational valueof Euskera – by the 1970s it was the self-run school for the pueblo, andonly migrant children were attending the state school. At that pointlocal society was totally segregated: in work, kinship, socialisation,festivities, worship and education.

The clubs, co-operatives and school had been created and run by thepueblo and were seen as ‘ours’. At a certain point ‘we’ became, once more,‘we Basques’. The ground had been laid in an earlier period, and therewas an older generation of PNV supporters to keep alive nationalistdiscourse in the privacy of the clubs. The Falange, and later the churchhierarchy, had acted vigorously, and counter-productively, againstopposition articulated in terms of the rights of the Basque people.However, Heiberg and her informants in Elgeta are adamant that thepolarisation of the village and the reconquering of municipal governmentwere not (at that time) driven by Basque nationalism, and were achievedbefore it spread into the village. The spread occurred only in the 1970s,when some of the clergy and a group of village youths began to campaignvigorously for the ikastola and for folklore festivals. Active support forthem became a marker of opposition to the Franco regime and of politicalcommitment to Basque nationalism – both in terms of the social life ofthe pueblo, and the political destiny of the Basque provinces. The moralsystem of the pueblo, and the impermeable barriers it constructed againstoutsiders, may have pre-existed the spread of a radical nationalistideology. What the new movement did was confirm these socialdivisions, express them in purely ethnic terms, and link the politics of thevillage to the national question of Basque–Spanish relations. It madethem homologous: Spaniards out of the Basque country (Euzkardi);Euzkardi out of Spain. In the political environment which emerged afterFranco’s death in 1975, the radical nationalists triumphed and invillages like Elgeta public life became monolithic. The factories employingmigrants shut, partly through lack of credit, while the co-operativessurvived; the state school was shut leaving only the ikastola. Some local


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people thought that the result was a happy extended family of moralharmony, others that the social environment was poisonous. As therecession bit in the 1980s, the migrants began to leave.

Conclusion to Part 1

Basque nationalism is articulated around the rights of a people whorecognise themselves as having a common culture, one which is distinctfrom their Spanish or French rulers. A national identity is inevitably anhistoricised concept; it is a narrative which defines who we are, in part,through reference to ancestry, and an enduring being or essence.Though the narrative can encompass change, there is always a coretheme of continuity – of unchanging attributes, qualities or relations.The continuity can be provided by a cultural tradition, by unbrokenresidence in a territory, or by descent: in narratives of national identitythese often overlap, or one element comes to stand for another which issubmerged. In the Basque case, for most of the historical period we havebeen examining, continuity is understood in terms of descent: the nationis constituted by the living representatives of the Basque race.

Anthropological approaches adopt widely different stances to theissues of boundedness and continuity which are found in nationalistmovements. For example, Zulaika, an important scholar in this field, canwrite that ‘All prehistoric reconstructions point to the unique occupa-tional centrality of hunting in Basque culture from the Palaeolithic eradown to the Christian era’ (Zulaika 1988: 187). Here the historicalrecord is confirming continuity, and hence identity. Other approachesare more ‘presentist’ in suggesting that a nationalist narrative constructsan identity by selecting out cultural themes, or by the invention oftradition. These approaches have their own conceptual difficulties, inthat they tend to accept ‘ethnicity’ as a useful term for the analysis ofcultural difference, but may dissociate themselves from the premises onwhich local constructions of ethnicity (or nationhood) are based: theexistence of a people who share a common, bounded and enduringculture. It is the connection which the term ethnicity makes between ‘apeople’ and ‘a culture’ which creates difficulties within anthropology.

This chapter has suggested that in the Basque provinces there isevidence of substantial continuities in the way in which some peoplegained their livelihoods and in certain cultural forms, includinglanguage; though these economic and cultural practices became salientwhen they were no longer taken for granted, but simply one wayamongst others. However there is a difference between evidence forcultural continuities and arguments that ‘Basque culture’ (something


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which is the property of a Basque ethnic group) is a distinctive and his-torically stable entity. Nor obviously do these cultural continuities implythat relations between the Basque and the Spanish people are invariantover the last 500 years, let alone since the Palaeolithic. The interestingissue is how cultural differences become ethnic ones.

Basque nationalism emerged in a particular social milieu – amongstthe intellectuals and sections of the middle class in the rapidly industri-alising towns of Vizcaya at the end of the nineteenth century. I have triedto show how key aspects of this political project were shaped by theexperience of these social actors in a specific environment: the defeat ofCarlism and the attacks on the church; the rise to power of a liberaloligarchy; the dislocation of industrial growth; mass immigration andthe very rapid consolidation of a socialist movement. Squeezed betweenthe political forces organising labour and those of the major industrialinterests, the middle strata developed a movement which would maketheir own position, cultural values and resources once again centralwithin this transforming social world. That meant the position of hard-working, industrious, autonomous, property-owning, devoutly Catholic,local people. It also meant that they created a narrative of loss, and amovement which would attempt to reverse the process of destruction.

The resulting movement successfully mobilised the political energiesof a growing proportion of the population, though not without tensionsand paradoxes. Its discourse was a fusion of Catholicism and ‘common-sense’ views of race and descent, which constructed the Basque nationas an historic people. The nation was exemplified in the present by thepeasantry, but others belonged by birth and could identify with itthrough their actions – by participation in the cultural and politicalactivity of the movement itself, with its festivities, clubs and sections. Ihave suggested that if we treat the culture of the Basque peasantry asforms of knowledge and practice embedded in economic and socialrelations, we find that it shared many features with other Europeanpeasantries. While the nationalist movement initially celebrated thoselinguistic and ‘folkloric’ features of peasant culture which woulddemarcate a nation, it also seized on those cultural items and perfor-mances which would resonate outside as well as inside a peasant milieu.The activists were not generating class or peasant politics, but stressingvertical lines of inclusion and exclusion – the shared culture of ‘thosefrom here’.

We can say that the movement worked to create a cross-class alliance,but this is a rather thin description. More than that, it was the creationof a network of communication and activities which brought togetherpeople of different social backgrounds in an environment where they


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shared a common language, understandings, and a commitment to apolitical cause. The movement consolidated when it became embeddedin social relations, and the nationalist discourse provided a frame ofreference for the interpretation of everyday social relations. At this point,when a group of farmers in Elgeta meet for a drink and to swap stories,they are manifesting their ethnicity: a minor example, perhaps, but arevealing one when compared with rural scenes elsewhere. In effect thediscourse had fused with the existing moral map of a pueblo, and provideda language for social relations and experiences. As it did so, the sense ofhome and homeland was particularly valorised (see Zulaika on thebasseria and ‘The House of my Father’, 1988: 131). This is the emotionalcharge of a nationalist movement: that it articulates those personal andintimate relations and experiences (what some have called the primordialloyalties) often strongly linked to a sense of threatened continuity. Thearticulation is re-focused around an ethnicised sense of self.

The movement operates through inclusion and exclusion, selectingout cultural differences and social divides, and re-inscribes them as thequalities of a people. This is the ethnicisation of social relations and,operating simultaneously with the opposition of other political forces andthe repressive policies of the Spanish state, it builds the Basque nation. Atthe end of it the nationalists have, for better or worse, hegemony overwhat constitutes Basque culture. In the rural district studied by Heibergthe social divides articulated by nationalism varied over time. In the1920s the divide was between ‘true Basques’ and those local people whowere either Carlist patrons or socialists; in the 1960s it was between localpeople and migrants. The fact that the nationalist movement operatedthrough the articulation of oppositions meant that it was not evennecessary for it to create a standardised Basque culture (though that wasone of its aspirations); it was only necessary for it to articulate, from amorally central space, an opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in culturalterms which people could recognise in their various local realities. Itworked through homology, not homogeneity.

This brings us to the last point, about the homology between Spaniardsin Euzkardi and Euzkardi in Spain. Basque nationalism always had a dualagenda. Its dominant ideology was about the rights of the Basque peoplein relation to the Spanish state, either for greater autonomy or for inde-pendence. Its second objective was political control within the Basqueprovinces, in competition with a strong, immigrant-backed socialistmovement. Heiberg argues that amongst local supporters the issue ofindependence was always less important than control within the Basqueprovinces, and this makes Basque nationalism rather unusual. The pointmay be valid if comparison is made with the early twentieth-century


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nationalist movements in the multi-ethnic empires of eastern Europe,but it seems to me that most west European regional and nationalistmovements have had this dual character. They have opposed the powerand influence of those local people who support, or are agents of,economic and political forces which are represented as alien, and gainedstrength by assimilating the question of foreign influence to the claim fornational autonomy.

PART TWO: ETA, THE STATE AND VIOLENCE

Industrial growth in the Basque provinces – especially Vizcaya – at theend of the nineteenth century generated two political movements:Spanish socialism and Basque nationalism. One hundred years later amore complex political situation existed. A second, more diffuse wave ofindustrialisation began in the late 1950s, bringing factories and migrantseven to the more rural districts, where two very different kinds of societywere uneasily juxtaposed. It did raise living standards, so that by the1970s Alava province had the highest per capita income in the country(Ben-Ami 1992: 148); but it also brought dislocation and socialproblems: pollution, poor housing and inadequate social services (Clark1984: 200ff.). Moreover, the industrial boom barely lasted a generation,since the manufacturing base was unable to compete successfully in aninternational market when the protectionist policies of the Franco eragave way to European Union accession. By the 1980s there wasrecession, a rise in unemployment to 20 per cent (far higher amongstyoung men) and the reversal of previous migratory trends, with a netoutflow of population. Farming may have continued to play animportant role in nationalist imagery, but it now only employed 10 percent of the population (Zulaika 1988: 102).

Cultural and political oppression co-existed with these economic diffi-culties. Children from Euskera-speaking households were pitched intomonolingual Spanish schools; the display of symbols and cultural formsassociated with Basque nationalism was suppressed by Franco’s policein ways which were both petty and brutal. When ETA emerged in thisenvironment in 1959, and later developed a military strategy, therepressive policies of the state intensified, and the Basque provincesbecame the most-policed region of the most-policed country in westernEurope (Clark 1984: 263). The police used mass arrests and the tortureof detainees to crush ETA. An international outcry over the trial of onegroup at Burgos in 1970 saved their lives, but others were executed rightup until Franco’s death in 1975. During the democratic transition, andlater under a socialist government, the violence escalated, with ETA


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killing a wide range of targets and the government employing deathsquads to eliminate activists.

The combination of economic, ethnic and democratic struggles createda very complex political landscape after 1960. Forms of class action re-emerged in the last decade of the Franco regime – there was even a waveof strike action in 1962 – under the hegemony of various pan-Spanishleft-wing parties. The PNV continued to articulate a ‘conservative’version of Basque nationalism, first from exile in France, then withincreasing success within the Basque provinces after the return ofdemocracy. The third element was the radical nationalism of ETA, aclandestine organisation dedicated to armed insurgency and the con-struction of an independent Marxist state of the seven Basque provinces.Another way of representing this shifting political landscape would beto say that it was a nationalist project, split between a conservative anda radical wing, and a socialist project split between a Spanish and aBasque component. Either way ETA (and the political parties which werespun off from it, or represented it in democratic arenas), became theradical centre, reshaping the discourse of Basque identity and condi-tioning the action of all other political actors in the region.

ETA (Euzkardi and Freedom) emerged in 1959 out of a variety of youthgroups circulating in the ambit of the PNV. Information on the socialbackground of its members is incomplete and contested, but Clark (1984:143–52) suggests that in the late 1970s ETA had over 1,000 activemembers, over 90 per cent of whom were men in their middle- to late20s, recruited predominantly from Euskera-speaking areas and fromfamilies with a history of nationalist sympathies. They came from avariety of backgrounds: manual and white-collar workers in the smallerfactories, the self-employed, students, priests. However, this clandestinemovement relied on the support of a variety of people, and operated inan environment with a pre-existing structure of closed associations – thecaudrillas described above.

These young people were convinced of the need to mobilise in the faceof the political stasis of the Spanish regime and the perceived inertia andcompromises of the PNV. Conversi (1997: 254) notes that since 1973ETA has operated under the slogan ‘Actions Unite, Words Divide’ andtaken an anti-intellectual turn, so that debates become almost a sign ofweakness, producing so many reasons for not acting. Commitment tothe cause was evaluated in terms of action, with death in violent con-frontations with the Spanish state representing the ultimate sacrifice. Ifaction took precedence over theory and programmes as a mode ofpolitical mobilisation, there was nevertheless a theory of action, madeexplicit in the writings of Krutwig (a key ETA leader). Armed attacks on


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the state would provoke brutal repressive measures against civilians,unleashing a spiral of violence which would render state power naked,and generate increased support for the armed struggle. A similar strategywas found in other armed insurgency movements of the 1970s,including the Italian Red Brigades. Wieviorka (1993) has argued thatthe violence of the ETA movement is a way of binding together theotherwise incompatible political objectives which run through it. Inanalysing what would constitute the liberation of the Basque people,most commentators have identified a plurality of positions, and acknow-ledged that there are continuities as well as ruptures between ETA andthe PNV.

The first strand in the ETA movement is the struggle for the culturalrights of the Basque people and for national self-determination. Thedominant definition of who constitutes the people is ‘those who speakEuskera’; indeed a Basque who fails to use the language is a traitor to thecause (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 166). In important ways thisrepresents a break with the racist doctrine of the Arana period, openingup the possibility – denied by racism – that a person can become Basqueand assimilate through acquiring the language. Urla (1993) has arguedthat the battle over the standardisation of the language represented amodernising project, and an acknowledgment that, especially since the1980s, Basque culture was dynamic and open to new forms. If in onesense the definition of the nation was more open, it was still incorporatedin an exclusionary view of local society: the preservation of Euskerarequired an independent state, and the rejection of a policy of bilingual-ism. The switch from a racial to a cultural definition of the nation doesnot represent a sudden or complete break with earlier political discourses.Most early ETA activists were formed in a milieu of passionateCatholicism, of the village school (ikastola) and an attachment to rurallifestyles and imagery: although some currents of the movementdenounced traditionalist versions of Basque culture, they remainedpotent. Racist formulations and the denigration of immigrants resurfacedhere and there in the nationalist movement, but more important thanthe formulations was the environment in which it operated. After all,ETA did not construct its category of the Basque nation in a vacuum, butin a society where an earlier nationalist movement and state repressionhad generated deep social divides and entrenched patterns of exclusionand inclusion. Social practice is more important than shifts in discourse.

The second strand in ETA viewed the primary struggle of the Basquepeople to be against capitalism, reflecting the more general renewal ofMarxist political culture in western Europe in the 1960s. The primarylocus of the struggle was the factories, and the enemies included those


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‘Basque’ oligarchs whom the PNV had denounced at the end of thenineteenth century. At various times ETA intervened in labour disputesby kidnapping or killing industrialists whose workers were on strike. Butthere were tensions within this ‘red separatism’. ETA activists were notwell represented in the major factory complexes, where the workingclass was primarily made up of ‘immigrants’ and organised – firstcovertly and then overtly – by Spanish left-wing parties. The actions ofthis faction of ETA, and their declarations of sympathy with otheroppressed groups in Spain, ‘seemed calculated to alienate the Catholicsmall-town milieu which had been the traditional base of Basquenationalism’ (Sullivan 1988: 96).

The third strand within ETA were known as the ‘Third-Worldists’(Clark 1984: 34). The relationship between the Basque provinces andthe rest of Spain was conceived as a colonial relationship, and thestruggle against it to be comparable to those taking place in 1960sAlgeria, Cuba or Vietnam. The difficulty with this analogy arose from thefact that the Basque provinces were the richest region of Spain, and thattheir representatives had played a leading role in the formation of Spanisheconomic policy for a century. So the analogy required some flexibilityin the use of categories (the Spanish, the Basques), but it had the virtueof moral simplicity, and provided a framework for combining argumentsabout economic and cultural forms of oppression. It was a convincingargument for as long as the Spanish government maintained a strongmilitary presence in the region, and ETA’s own strategy assured this.

These three strands coexisted uneasily within ETA, with the balanceshifting over time. An assembly held in the late 1960s adopted theconception of the Pueblo Trabajador Vasco (the Basque working people),defined as those who earned their living in the Basque country and whosupported Basque aspirations. Sullivan (1988: 55; 62) suggests that theconception allowed the different factions to interpret the protagonists ofthe movement in different ways: the ‘Pueblo’ could be essentially Basqueor essentially working class. However, the history of ETA is one of repeatedfission and a shifting kaleidoscope of breakaway groupings, between ETA5 and ETA 6, ETA military and ETA political. Rather than summarisingthe chronology of the factions (there are excellent accounts in Clark 1984and Sullivan 1988) we can indicate a synthesising principle: each time agroup of activists begins to privilege the class struggle over the nationalistone, they tend to form alliances with other extra-parliamentary or par-liamentary left-wing forces. They are then ejected or marginalised by ETAas ‘españolistas’ – pro-Spanish. A whole series of groupings, including themoderate nationalist party Euskadito Ezkerra (EE), have followed thattrajectory. Over the long run the dominant discourse within ETA became


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that of the ‘Third-Worldists’, which combined class and nationalismwithin an anti-colonial framework.

The use of violence was itself one of the factors which precipitated thedifferent factions within ETA. Targeting the police and the military maybe a coherent strategy for a national liberation movement operatingwithin a highly oppressive regime. But for those who believed that theywere engaged essentially in a class struggle, requiring mass mobilisa-tion, forged in factories and city neighbourhoods, this kind of violencebuilt no solidarities, and could indeed be alienating and counter-productive. The shift towards class therefore tended to mark not just‘pro-Spanish’ sympathies but a gradual renunciation of armedinsurgency. Once again the ‘Third-Worldists’ held the ring, embracinga Che Guevara-style strategy of freedom fighters taking to the mountainsto liberate the people from freedom and colonialism. It was a strategybuilt on a very slippery concept of ‘the people’, on the prospect ofescalating guerrilla warfare (unlikely given the dense militarisation ofthe state), and on a ‘pressure cooker’ model of revolutionary violence:screw them down and they will blow. For a sustained critique of explicitand implicit uses of pressure cookers and volcanoes as models for politicalviolence, see Aya (1990).

The second important factor in understanding the strategy of violenceand the tensions within ETA is the wider political context. Dictatorialregimes do indeed fuse political struggles, at least to the extent that theyare responsible for both economic and cultural forms of oppression, andno progress is possible on any front until the regime is ended. The assas-sination of Admiral Blanco, Franco’s chosen successor, in a bomb attackin Madrid in 1973 cemented ETA’s reputation as the force that was doingthe most to end the dictatorship, and suffering the greatest losses in theprocess. Spain’s transition to democracy after 1975 is usually seen asone of the quickest and most successful in European history, culminatingin the 1978 Constitution which gave greater autonomy to the SpanishBasque provinces than the statute of 1936. But the late 1970s – whichmight have witnessed a reduction in tension, a separation of politicalprojects and a return to democratic strategies – were marked by anescalation of violence, and the consolidation of ETA and its strategy ofarmed insurgency.

In practice, no transition is that quick or complete. Even democraticparties take time to coalesce and establish their social bases, and youcannot put an insurgency movement on hold for five years while thepicture clarifies. As importantly, there were clearly continuities duringthe change of regime. There were no significant purges of state personnel,and the frequently brutal institutional culture of the police and the


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military in the provinces remained. There were strong forces within thestate opposed to any weakening of Spanish unity, and delays in theprocess of devolution even after the passing of the new constitution. ThePNV emerged as the largest party in the region and, after a period oftactical manœuvres, developed an accommodation with thegovernment, accepted the overall framework of autonomy within Spain,and settled into regional power. A minority continued to demand inde-pendence and pursued it through violence. Activists raised financethrough revolutionary taxation (or extortion) from business people,raided deposits for explosives and reactivated the killing campaign: 15died in 1975, 64 in 1978 (Ben-Ami 1992: 159). They killed members ofthe civil guard, high-ranking military officers, police informers andbusinessmen, extending the campaign to Madrid and the tourist resorts.By June 1993 they had killed 749 people, 453 from the security forcesand 296 civilians (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 194).

The political developments in the Basque country have stimulated asubstantial volume of research and analysis on the tragic levels ofviolence produced by the conflict between an armed insurgencymovement and the state in a western European democracy. They havealso traced the evolution of a nationalist movement which, thoughoriginally built around a conservative and racist discourse, developed aradical class-based project. Wieviorka (1993) has argued that there is infact a connection between the levels of violence and the attempt to holdtogether disparate political projects in one movement. We can look ateach of the issues in turn.

A democratic government has a more difficult task in dealing witharmed insurgency than a dictatorship. It normally employs twostrategies – one ‘political’, one repressive – with a complex interactionbetween the two. The first strand is negotiation, attempting to convertdemands into formulae which can be dealt with democratically, and inthe process splitting away those in the movement whose demands can beaccommodated within an existing or acceptable constitutionalarrangement. This is assisted by raising the stakes for those who remainoutside the negotiating process. The strategy aims to reduce the size andpopular support for the movement down to a small core, whose demandsare not negotiable and whose actions are categorised as criminal – aproblem of law and order. But in the face of entrenched clandestineactivists, normal policing – that is, the identification and conviction ofcriminals – is comparatively ineffective. Intelligence-gathering is hard,informants (chivatos) extremely vulnerable, and a process of law withevidence and witnesses may become virtually inoperable. If armedinsurgents can act with impunity there is a crisis for the state, and its


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agents may adopt other methods: arbitrary raids and mass arrests(14,000 since 1978), torture, confessions extracted under duress, thesuspension of civil liberties, military tribunals, imprisonment withouttrial, forced exile on suspicion of subversive activities. State violence cantake many forms, and most of them have been employed in the Basqueprovinces. The most ruthless involved death squads, a dirty war of covertoperations by militarily trained agents from within Spain, and from theunderworld of western European right-wing extremism. These anti-terrorist forces (GAL) operated with the knowledge and connivance ofthe socialist government in the 1980s; 67 are thought to have beenkilled, in addition to those who died in overt police operations or whileheld in custody (Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 205).

Ruthless and illegal forms of state violence themselves represent arealisation of ETA’s own strategy and, far from isolating intransigentactivists, may increase their support. If the state uses illegal and violentstrategies to maintain its power within the territory, it undermines itsown authority and the distinction between legal and criminal activity.The two contending forces become comparable, lending legitimacy tothe political claims and methods of radical nationalists.

The spiral of violence is generated both by state practice and factorsinternal to radical nationalism. Clark (1984: 278) has suggested that‘ETA is caught in the grip of forces that are created by insurgent violenceitself, and that tend to make the violence self-sustaining.’ He suggeststhat exiting from the organisation can be difficult, partly because it is seenas a betrayal, with a real possibility of feuds and revenge killings. Heiberg(1989) and Zulaika (1988), in very different ways, reveal the dynamicsof life within ETA – of small groups of young people, who have normallyshared large parts of their adolescent and young adult life in the samecaudrilla, and whose active political life has only been possible throughthe maintenance of very strong relationships of trust and loyalty. Theactions of the movement have generated a cumulative narrative ofheroism and sacrifice which gives sense and value to those of the nextgeneration. Armed insurgency movements are totalising, and the priceof exit is very high in terms of a break with the bounded social worldwithin which their lives are lived, and the rejection of the discourse withinwhich they have meaning. Indirect evidence for this comes from thosewho have successfully left. Wieviorka (1993: Chapter 13) conductedinterviews with a group of veterans of the armed struggle, whosecomments on those who stayed inside demonstrate a total rejection: ‘theyare crazy, paranoid’ (183); ‘mafiosi who live on extorted money’, ‘nazis’(192); ‘with a taste for necrophilia and a cult of the dead’ (185).


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Wieviorka advances an interpretation of the continued violence whichis more structural and political. ETA and the umbrella organisation ofthe MLNV (Basque Liberation) pursue disparate political objectives(speaking for the suppressed nation, social movements and therevolution) and attempt to forge them into the ‘myth of an all-Basquemovement’, with the ETA activists as a vanguard elite. In argument andconfrontation with representatives of any single struggle, ETA claimsboth that these lesser objectives are part of a higher good which can onlybe realised through separatism, and that its activists are the only onesseriously committed to its realisation. In a series of dialogues (Wieviorka1993: Chapter 14) the separatists position themselves very clearly withinlocal political culture, castigating representatives of the PNV as conser-vative and indifferent to working-class issues, and castigating theSocialist Party as indifferent to the needs of the Basque people. Thispositioning would of course be destroyed if independence were everachieved. Violence – as well as being a response to state violence, and astrategy chosen to achieve separatism – is a way of creating solidaritywithin the movement and fusing together its objectives. A markedambivalence emerges in Wieviorka’s dialogues with the veterans, whofeel that in renouncing violence they have also renounced any hope fora significant transformation of society. The interviews evoke a loss ofcertainty and a nostalgia for a time when a radically different future wasan orienting narrative, similar to those of the class movements dealt within earlier chapters.

The ethnographic accounts make clear that, for the activists of theseparatist movement, there is indeed only one issue; that at the level ofexperience the movement and its strategy of armed insurgency havefused what, elsewhere and for others, were distinct political struggles. Ishall conclude this chapter with some brief comments on the moregeneral implications of this situation.

The Basque separatist movement is not the only one in contemporaryEurope which is attempting to articulate both a nationalist and a class-based programme – there are many others, including the republicanmovement in Northern Ireland and the Occitan movement in southernFrance. In each case there is recourse to a generalised notion of ‘thepeople’ which is capable of interpretation in both a class and an ethnicsense. We shall be returning to the dilemmas of ‘populism’ in theConclusion. In the Basque case there is a specific problem. In thoseperiods during the last 100 years when the working class of the Basqueprovinces had been politically constructed, and the temporary absenceof dictatorship had allowed them to mobilise, this had been achieved bySpanish left-wing parties, primarily amongst an ‘immigrant’ population.


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The Basque nationalist movement had been, in part, a reaction to thisdevelopment, and elements of exclusionary practice still cast a longshadow over it. Whatever the general problems of combining class andethnicity, it is certainly hard to construct a persuasive case for anindependent socialist state if the movement conceptualises the majorityof the working class as belonging to another nation, and cannot maketheir experience and aspirations central to a future society. In this contextit is worth noting that, although we know a great deal about rural lossand the rich symbolism which frames the life and death of radical nation-alists, we know much less (from English-language sources) about thedouble oppression experienced by a migrant worker in Bilbao in 1890or in Alava in 1970.

But these exclusionary practices are not the whole story, and withinthe movement some factions have encouraged changes in both discourseand practice. Race and fixity give way to process; as many authors havenoted, you are not born a patriot but become one through action, andthat road is increasingly open to all. There are verbs for becoming apatriot (abertzaletu), and a word for the adopted homeland (Conversi1997: 252). The identity narrative is increasingly constructed aroundthe nationalist movement itself, with its own continuities and forkingpaths, while the original cultural content becomes considerably dilutedand attenuated. Increasing numbers of young people from non-Euskera-speaking backgrounds participate in the movement, though because ofregional devolution and educational reforms they are also more likely toacquire some knowledge of Euskera and to use it in a variety of contem-porary media and events.

The depth of this support is shown by the vote for Herri Batasuna(Popular Unity). This party and its successor (which rarely takes its seatsin the regional assembly) is part of the liberation movement, often speaksfor ETA in public, and has been described by political scientists as a catch-all anti-system party. In the last decade it has attracted up to 20 per centof the electorate in the provinces, and provided a home for those engagedin a variety of struggles – against the nuclear industry, and in favour ofenvironmental issues or gay rights (though less amongst feminists). Thefocus for direct action has been the Spanish state and its local agents; itscutting edge – implicitly and explicitly – has been those who are preparedto use violence to achieve a new nation-state within a Europeanfederation. If this is a nationalist movement, it is not now one which isgenerated principally out of a struggle for cultural rights (aroundlanguage, for example), but one which feeds off a variety of acute socialproblems, not least those derived from crippling unemployment andrecession. It has to be said that adopting a more open set of criteria by


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which to judge somebody a patriot does not necessarily lead to a changedview of patriotism, or represent tolerance for cultural diversity.

SOURCES

The literature in English on Basque nationalism is very substantial, withmajor contributions from anthropologists, historians and politicalscientists. The best and most recent work also draws extensively onSpanish scholarship. Although the material is generally of very highquality, it is rather compartmentalised, with little attempt to synthesisethe different lines of analysis or interpretation which have emerged.

This chapter draws most heavily on Marianne Heiberg’s The Makingof the Basque Nation (1989), which covers the economic and politicaltransformations of the Basque provinces, but crucially also contains thekind of ethnographic detail which is essential for thinking through theethnicisation of social relations, and the way this political movementcame to articulate core areas of experience. In addition to themonograph, in the first part of the chapter I have also drawn on Heiberg(1975 and 1980), and a number of other scholars for ideas andinformation: Ben-Ami (1992), which is an excellent short overview;Conversi (1997), who provides a wealth of political history in acomparative perspective; Clark (1979); Greenwood (1976 and 1977);MacClancey (1993); Payne (1975); Urla (1993) and Zulaika (1988).After outlining my ideas on a narrative of loss to Diego Muro-Ruiz, hesupplemented my limited knowledge of Spanish by recommendingJuaristi (1998), where similar themes are explored and the parallels withIreland developed.

In the second part of the chapter, concerned with ETA and violence,the key source is Wieviorka (1993). The author collaborated withTourrain in the development of action sociology; whatever reservationsone may have about research method, it has generated very stimulatingdata and insights into political process. I have also gleaned muchinformation on political developments from Clark (1984), Sullivan(1988), Laitin (1995), and, on local constructions, from Zulaika andDouglass (1996).


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7 YUGOSLAVIA: MAKING WAR

A study of nationalism in eastern Europe inevitably has a differentagenda from one of a society such as Spain. There are important andprofound differences in the timing of industrialisation, the way empiresbroke up, the character of the ruling groups in the new states, the organ-isation of cultural diversity, the experience of communism. All these willemerge in the discussion of Yugoslavia, and give breadth to the overalltreatment of nationalist movements. At the same time we shall returnto themes which have already been explored, including the reaction ofrural populations to the repeated disruptions and dislocations of thetwentieth century, and the role of violence in political action. Above allwe shall return to the forging of national identity in the interactionbetween local sets of social and cultural relations and state-level politics.

Yugoslavia has long been a theatre of war: a territory which was peri-odically contested by two great empires, then devastated in two worldwars, and again in the 1990s. Nobody born in this region in the last twocenturies could have reached the age of 45 without being caught up inwar and most would have been involved much younger, and more thanonce in their lives. They were caught up not as civilians in a societyconducting a campaign against some remote enemy, but in a massivelydestructive land war which passed through their homes. Between 1912and 1918 one-quarter of the population of Serbia died, including two-thirds of all men between 15 and 55 (Judah 1997: 101). Yugoslaviasuffered as much death and destruction as any society in the SecondWorld War (Simic 1973: 59). In these traumatic periods, as in theuprisings and liberation struggles of the nineteenth century, war wasfollowed by massive internal migrations.

A second important feature of Yugoslav society is that, like the rest ofthe Balkans, it was until recently overwhelmingly rural. Nearly 80 percent of the population were employed in agriculture in 1920; and evenin 1961, after a decade of very rapid industrial growth, agriculture stillemployed half the workforce (see Ramet 1996: 75; Simic 1973: 30). Theproportion was always higher in Serbia. It was an economy built on

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intensive subsistence agriculture, but if peasants are to achieve alivelihood for themselves and their children they need residential andsocial stability.

The co-existence of these two dimensions suggests important tensionswithin Yugoslav historical experience. It had a time-scale of a ruralsociety, privileging continuity and stability in the relationship betweenkin groups and land; but there was another of destruction, migrationand wars, which can be retrospectively collapsed into each other asepisodes in one epic struggle. One reason for introducing thesedimensions at the beginning of the chapter is that they represent the twoaxes of an identity narrative (as suggested in the Introduction) – oneestablishing roots and continuity, the other an enduring opposition. Theyare also both important factors in understanding the power of nationalistmovements in the region, since national identities draw heavily onpeasant culture, while war is one of the ways in which nationalism isconsolidated. This chapter will analyse the dominance of nationalistpolitics in post-communist Yugoslavia, not as the return of ancientconflicts between peoples, but as specific political movements operatingon complex lines of economic and cultural differentiation.

Many accounts of the Yugoslav tragedies of the 1990s begin with ahistory of various named peoples – Serbs, Croats – who were firstconquered and then struggled to achieve their independence from theOttoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. There is much to be learnt fromaccounts which chart a millennium of ethnic history, but in the absenceof other social and political themes, of the kind which had been importantin earlier scholarship, they lead to only one conclusion: we are witnessingthe latest stage in an ancient Balkan tribal conflict. It is helpful to readnot just recent studies, in which every historical conflict ‘prefigures’ thecurrent violence, but also those which bring out the complexity ofeconomic and cultural differentiation. There are certainly continuitieswithin Yugoslavia, in terms of social practice and of the historicalnarratives which interpret the conflicts. But we should also see theterritory of Yugoslavia as an area of constant flux, of evolving culturesand shifting social boundaries, interspersed with periods when thoseboundaries harden into total exclusion. In the twentieth century the mostimportant cause (not consequence) of that hardening has been war.

The second reason for introducing these other dimensions is toemphasise the variety of political movements in the Balkans, and thatthey have economic as well as cultural roots. The peasantry was at thecentre of many political struggles. In the nineteenth century this regionhad become a granary for Europe, exporting cereals, but this was onlyachieved through very high levels of extraction and falling living


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standards for the rural population. The Russian Revolution in 1917sent shock waves through the Balkans. It was a major factor stimulatinga massive land-reform programme, a measure designed to stave off moreviolent upheavals. The reforms broke up the large estates, distributedland to the peasantry and strengthened an intensive farming system.Not all the problems of rural overpopulation and malnutrition weresolved, but the ‘Green Rising’ and the land reform was acclaimed byone observer as ‘a vast victory for the peasants, and therefore a vastdefeat for the Communists and the capitalists’ (Chesterton, 1922, inMitrany 1951: 118).

Politically, the main beneficiary of the new measures that enfranchisedthe peasants of eastern Europe was not the Communist Party (with itsRed Peasant International founded in Moscow in 1923), since it had littlesupport until the Second World War. Instead it was the Agrarian orPopulist Parties, which themselves organised a co-ordinating GreenInternational in Prague throughout the inter-war years, attempting todevelop common programmes across national divides, both withinexisting states and across international borders. Co-operation waspossible, and began to take practical forms: such practice was consideredtreasonable by those in power (Mitrany 1951: 137), and eventuallycontributed to the downfall of the Agrarian Parties. Their programmeshad been built around democracy, property rights, the establishment ofco-operatives, small-scale rural-based industrialisation, direct propor-tional taxation, and increased public expenditure in rural areas.

These radical programmes brought peasant organisations into conflictwith urban mercantilism (Mitrany 1951: 121). If the vast majority ofthe population was rural, the towns were inhabited predominantly bytraders, bureaucrats and soldiers. Belgrade, the capital of the newKingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, created in 1918, was subse-quently a city ‘top-heavy with petty bureaucrats and corrupt officialdom’(Simic 1973: 59). The city was populated by those who benefited mostfrom the new state machinery, financed from revenues extracted over-whelmingly from the rural population. The clash between rural andurban interests took a brutal turn in many parts of the Balkans. InBulgaria the Agrarian government was overthrown, and its leaderStamboliski murdered in 1923 (Bell 1977). Radic, the leader of theCroatian peasant party, was assassinated in 1928, and this was followedin 1929 by the establishment of a dictatorship in Yugoslavia under theking. Throughout eastern Europe (with the exception of Czechoslovakia)the peasant parties lost power to the officer class.

Accounts of war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s stress, quite rightly, thelegacy of the vicious conflicts between 1941 and 1945, but by taking a

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longer time-span we get a rather more complex picture. We see, forexample, the enduring importance of the social division between townand country, and the way it frequently cut across emerging nationalidentities (see Halpern and Halpern 1972: 12). Peasant culture has beenthe bedrock on which Serbian and Croatian nationalism were built, butthis does not necessarily mean that the peasants themselves were alwaysnationalistic. When in 1868 Serbian landlords began replacing theOttomans they were considered just as rapacious as their predecessors,and faced continuous uprisings from their serfs (Judah 1997: 54). In theland-reform period after 1918, there was a general ‘hardening of thenationalist temper’ where the social division between landlords andpeasants was overlaid by linguistic and religious differences (as in Croatiaand the Vojvodina), but the same political agenda was articulated by thepeasants in other areas where this was not the case (Mitrany 1951: 88).The dissatisfactions articulated by nationalist movements need contex-tualising in relation to both peasant–urban relations and central statepolicy. Put another way, if we insist on reading the country’s politicalhistory only in terms of nationalism, we also have to admit that there ismore to national conflicts than the conflict between nations.

This chapter will concentrate on the period since the Second WorldWar, with only selective forays into earlier periods. It starts with a briefsummary of communist economic development, followed by a sectionon the organisation of the Yugoslav federation, which recognised bothterritorial divisions (republics) and peoples (narod). The central sectionis an account of local-level diversity, drawing out the connectionsbetween social groups and cultural differences, and the way these weretransformed by communist practice. Ethnographic analysis is vital to ourunderstanding of nationalism, but has to work with details which arenot generalisable to the whole of Yugoslavia. I have chosen Bosnia(Serbia would have been simpler, Macedonia still more complex) partlybecause of the quality of the ethnography, partly because so much wasat stake there in terms of cultural pluralism and international interven-tion. The last part of the chapter deals with the destruction of Yugoslavia,covering the strategies of the dominant groups under late communism,the principles which informed international intervention, and theconnections between ethnicity and violence.

YUGOSLAVIA UNDER COMMUNISM

In 1941 Yugoslavia was overrun by Italian and German troops. Fightingand reprisals continued right up to and beyond the liberation of Belgradein 1945. During the war a pro-Nazi government – the Ustashe – was


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established in Greater Croatia, while further south, Serb nationalist forces– the Chetniks – led by officers of the Yugoslav army, continued to fightfor the construction of a greater Serbia. In between were the partisans,led by Tito and built around a nucleus of a few thousand communistactivists who had survived the first onslaught in 1941. They dug in deepin the mountains of Bosnia, which was never totally controlled by theGerman army, and expanded into a large and successful liberation army– a process aided by the switch of British support from the Chetniks tothe partisans. It was a long war, with brutality on all sides. Over a millionpeople died, including tens of thousands of civilians who were roundedup in death camps, the most notorious of which was run by the CroatUstashe at Jasenovac.

Yugoslavia emerged after 1945 as a Stalinist state, centralised aroundits Communist Party and the army, dedicated to ‘Brotherhood and Unity’,the construction of Yugoslav citizens and comrades. There were furthermassive internal migrations – for example from the poorer mountainregions to repopulate the Vojvodina, from which German populationshad been evicted. There was ruthless suppression of internal dissent evenafter the break with Stalin in 1948, and the later emergence ofYugoslavia as a champion of the Nonaligned Movement. Communisteconomic policy was directed towards rapid industrialisation, achievedas in the Soviet Union through the control of labour, the extraction ofraw materials, and by holding down agricultural prices. In the early post-war period there had been a land-collectivisation programme, quicklyreversed, and agriculture remained dominated by small property-holdersand co-operatives. Very high levels of investment in heavy industryproduced some of the highest growth rates in Europe up until the mid-1960s, and the cities boomed. This was not a standard ‘commandeconomy’ since market principles were introduced into the supply ofconsumer goods, and there were measures of ‘workers’ self-management’ in the factories, but the all-important decisions on capitalinvestment were made on a country-wide basis and remained undercentral state control.

From the 1960s various social and economic problems with thechosen development path began to emerge. There were growing debtproblems, and rising unemployment, to which partial solutions werefound by opening up the country to mass tourism, and allowingYugoslav citizens to travel abroad for work (creating a million Yugoslavgastarbeiter by 1980). Central planning of capital investment coulddeliver a period of rapid growth in terms of infrastructure and basicindustrial goods, but it suffered from rigidities which became moreserious in the 1970s and 1980s, with changing consumption patterns


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and an evolving global division of labour. It was easy to go on buildinglarge steel plants and refineries; harder to adopt new technologies andflexible production patterns. The communist government had taken overa country with very marked regional disparities, but their own policiesexacerbated the situation, so that by 1970 the per capita GDP of Sloveniawas six times that of Kosovo. A struggle emerged between the richerregions (Slovenia, Croatia) which wanted more decentralisation andmarket-based decision-making, and the poorer regions (Serbia and thesouth) which wanted centralisation and redistribution (Bojicic 1996).

Regional disparities – and nationalist stirrings in Croatia which hadbeen suppressed in 1971 – fed into a substantial constitutional reformenacted under Tito in 1974. In a complex series of moves, verysubstantial powers were devolved to the regions, while the federalgovernment retained control over foreign policy and the military. At thesame time the Communist Party (now organised as a Yugoslav League)strengthened its powers within the new structures, vetting and co-optingofficials in all key positions (Dyker 1996: 55). The 1974 constitutionalreform is referred to by all analysts of the break-up of Yugoslavia, partlybecause it is the moment when the current political units, which had hada shadowy existence since 1918, emerged with substantial autonomy;and partly because the federal constitution itself was both weak, in thatthe power given to the republics impeded federal decision-making, andrigid, in that it made further reform – including the introduction ofdemocracy – virtually impossible.

The republics gained presidents, parliaments and ministers, raneducation policies, decided how many Slovene-speaking doctors wereneeded, ran their own media. Not least, the republics had control overtheir economic policy, and there was a shift from nationwide planning toregional autarky. In other words the bosses of each republic had as theirmain concern

to obtain sufficient resources to finance their own favourite development projects,aimed at as high a degree of self-sufficiency as possible ... in the case of the less-developed regions this frequently meant going for prestige projects, offering verylittle productive return for their regional economies. (Bojicic 1996: 43)

Policies directed at the efficiency of the Yugoslav economy as a wholewere marginalised, and the more industrially developed republics tradedincreasingly with other countries rather than with other republics, whilebeing constrained to transfer funds to the poorer regions. The statisticsdocumenting this process are complex and contested, because they arean important part of the argument about the inevitability of the break-up of Yugoslavia and the future of its successor states. What we can note


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is that the 1974 Constitution generated very strong regionally focusedpower bases within each republic, and that opposition to communismwithin Yugoslavia took a distinctive form. Whereas elsewhere in easternEurope dissident movements had grown up opposing totalitarian statepower, in Yugoslavia the enemy was the federal authority which waslimiting republican autonomy, while organising opposition acrossrepublics was extremely difficult (Vejvoda 1996a).

The reforms did not halt the decline of the Yugoslav economy. In fact,in conjunction with the worsening international climate, theyaccelerated the centrifugal processes and the country’s economiccollapse. In earlier periods the Yugoslav federal government had beenextremely skilled in manipulating its international position in the highlypolarised world of the Cold War:

Its independence was in fact a strategic resource that depended on the convictionof Western powers that national communism in the Balkans was a propagandaasset, and that Yugoslav neutrality could be a vital element of Nato’s strategy ofcontainment in the east. (Woodward 1996: 157)

A kind of soft deal was done. Yugoslavia acted as a buffer zone againstSoviet threats in south-east Europe, and denied the USSR access to theAdriatic. In return Yugoslavia obtained western loans, and access towestern markets and technology, not least to build up a very strongmilitary capability. By 1980, with European recession hitting bothexports and the demand for migrant workers, Yugoslavia hadaccumulated $20 billion of foreign debt and was struggling to deal withthe financial crisis.

In 1982 Yugoslavia, like other debtor countries, was the subject ofan IMF austerity and stabilisation programme. It involved restrictionson imports, a freeze on wages and salaries (while inflation continued),cuts in public expenditure and an inevitable sharp rise in unemploy-ment. The result was high levels of hardship and economic insecurity,and it is worth dwelling briefly on the impact of this for rural–urbanrelations. Accounts of urbanisation throw up one interesting statistic:even in the expansionary period of the 1970s, urban families spent 70per cent of their income on food (Simic 1973: 115). Ethnographyreveals that an important strategy for piecing together a livelihood intown was to maintain direct access to rural production, either throughretaining property rights or through extended kin links (Despalatovic1993). In the 1980s the government programme for absorbing surpluslabour included sending ‘the actual and potential unemployed back tofamilies, villages and private-sector agriculture and trades’ (Woodward1996: 159) – a difficult policy given the generally high educational


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qualifications of such people. Radosevic (1996: 72) notes that by 1989nearly a quarter of the population were living in poverty, but that halfof these lived in the countryside: ‘this was a prime reason for the absenceof social unrest, as ownership of land permitted the rural population tobe self-sufficient in food’. Olsen (1993) also notes increased dependenceon personal networks in order to obtain a livelihood. We do not havemany ethnographic accounts of the poverty and frustration in the1980s. However, there is evidence that many people who had embarkedon urban-based livelihoods in industry and the professions foundthemselves forced back into total or partial dependence on peasantagriculture and extended rural-based kin.

Towards the end of the 1980s there was one last attempt to reassertsome central control over decision-making and deal with the financialproblems. In 1990 the last federal prime minister, Markovic, tried withsome success to enact a stabilisation package, and regain control overthe money supply. But the balance of power had shifted decisively to therepublics, and Milosevic effectively subverted these controls and assertedthe right of bosses in Serbia and elsewhere to print money in order to dealwith regional deficits (for the Serbian Great Bank Robbery see Dyker1996: 59). In addition the international context had been utterlytransformed. The Cold War was over, and Yugoslavia no longer had thesame strategic importance as a buffer zone. Eastern Europe was filling upwith countries anxious for European Union accession and westerncredits: Yugoslavia went to the back of the queue. Some internationalplayers were blind or indifferent to the fate of Yugoslavia, while othershad already begun unilateral negotiations with its constituent republics,on the premiss that they were dealing with nascent nation-states. Wecan now turn to the issue of nationalism within Yugoslavia.

REPUBLICS AND PEOPLES

The social organisation of cultural diversity is crucial in understandingthe political and military struggles of the 1990s. Analysis involvesunpacking categories like Serb, Croat and Muslim, and looking at theways in which these identities emerge over time, and at different levelsof social organisation. I shall start with the categories used by the state,which are relatively simple, and then move to an ethnographically-baseddiscussion of identities in everyday social life, with their more complexand fluid practices of inclusion and exclusion.

The 1974 Constitution had created the republics as ‘sovereign states’within the federation: bounded and increasingly differentiated territorialunits with their own economic and social policies. Citizenship of Serbia


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thus denoted a civic status. However, the Constitution also reaffirmedthat the Yugoslav federation was made up of peoples or nationalities, andthe right to secede from the federation was granted to peoples. There weresix such peoples (or narod): Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins,Macedonians and the ‘ethnic Muslims of Bosnia’ – although the latterwere only granted this status in 1971, previously having been a religiouscategory. These were the ‘constituent’ peoples of Yugoslavia, in the sensethat the majority of such people lived there. The state classification ofcultural diversity, however, was more complex than this, in that therewere other peoples (termed narodnosti), such as Albanians or Hungarians,who were generally distinguished from narod in that the majority of thepopulation lived outside Yugoslavia (Sorabji 1989: 13). There was afurther category of minorities such as Gypsies. These are censuscategories, and there was one other: that of Yugoslav, used as a defaultfor those who declared national categories not recognised as one of the sixnarod, and more positively by those who identified with the federation.

What happened after 1974 was that the interests of the republics as‘sovereign states’ were increasingly merged with those of the narod, whorepresented the majority, so regional elites articulated their interests interms of nationalism. Instead of consolidating civic conceptions ofcitizenship and developing policies of cultural pluralism at a society-widelevel, the issue of cultural difference was cast in territorial terms, andconsidered solved by the creation of homelands.Yugoslavia became apatchwork of majorities and minorities – but particularly minorities: thosewho did not live in the republic of their narod, or who had the misfortuneto live in a republic which had no overall majority – the ill-fated Bosnia.

Yugoslavia illustrates many of the general problems of establishingdemocratic political life in post-communist states, and the rise ofnationalism as the principle legitimating ideology. The problems becameexacerbated because the regime had not only suppressed democracyuntil the day of its collapse, it had created a political structure whichchannelled all dissent into arguments about the rights of nationalmajorities and minorities. The political logic which follows is nicelysummed up in the question, ‘Why should we be a minority in your statewhen you can be a minority in ours?’ (quoted in Vejvoda 1996b: 260).Nationality became central in the political life of the republics, and theirfortunes incorporated into historical narratives of their constituentnations. This nationalist reading of Yugoslav history becomes sopervasive that it inhibits thinking in any other way about the kinds ofeconomic and cultural differences which predated the 1990s descent intowar. Accounts of those wars (and of Yugoslav society) are predicated onthe assumption that there exists a finite number of stable ethnic groups


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(6, 18 or 43) which, as it were, ‘pre-exist’ any political process, andthemselves create a political problem, since their co-existence within onestate is increasingly seen as problematic. The solution – the key tocreating stability – is conceived in territorial form, with the creation ofnew nation-states – or ethnically homogeneous cantons, as in Bosnia.The consensus around this solution emerges from a macabre dancebetween the ‘international community’ and a particularly ruthless post-communist generation of leaders within Yugoslavia. There is nowseparation into ‘mono-ethnic’ blocs, and deep social divides do indeedexist, but this situation has been the product of political processes – someold, some very recent – which have reworked and simplified complex andfluid patterns of cultural differentiation, and overridden those social andpolitical divides which did not involve ethnicity. We will get a better graspof that process by looking at some ethnographic accounts of social lifefrom periods when war did not appear inevitable.

CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN BOSNIA

In the early 1970s Lockwood studied a district of small towns and villagesin Bosnia, Skoplje Polje, and one element in his account of social organ-isation is the nacija. He says that the term corresponds to ‘nation’ andrefers to this aspect of social organisation as ethnicity, a usage discussedat the end. He says that each nacija is largely endogamous, that

members of each consider themselves, and are considered by others, as adistinct and unique variety of mankind, are perceived as possessing certain God-given qualities regarded (albeit wrongly) as unchanging and unchangeable. Alocal folktale illustrates this well. Each of the nacije went to God and one by onewere given their special attributes and way of life by Him; last of all came theGypsies, and therefore they must be satisfied with the leavings of others.(Lockwood 1975: 22–3)

Given the nature of the categories, it ought to be a very straightforwardmatter establishing how many nacije existed locally. The first answer isthat six were traditionally established in the district: Serbs, Croats,Muslims, Gypsies, Cincars and Sephardic Jews, until these latter werekilled in the war. However, a series of post-war migrations have broughtin a further 9 categories of people, making about 14. The first observationis that this small area shows considerable heterogeneity, and thatthrough massacre and migration the composition changes significantlywith every generation.

A second point to note, following Lockwood, is that though local peopleconsider these categories to be stable and God-given, this is unlikely tobe the case. The Cincars, for example, are said to be ‘serbianised Vlachs’.


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Once herders, then settled coppersmiths, they have switched theirlanguage (from one that was Latin-based to Serbo-Croat) and are nowassimilated into the Serbian population whose religion they share. If thiswas an ‘ethnic’ category, it was defined as much around a now-defunctoccupational niche as by cultural distinctiveness, and no longer has anysalience. It is refreshing to see some verbs (‘serbianisation’, ‘magyarisa-tion’) breaking through the language of timeless categories.

Thirdly, how clear-cut are these categories in local usage? What infact makes a social grouping a nacija? For example, the Gypsy population,who declared themselves Muslims in the census, are internally divided onalmost every count. One group – the whites – are permanently settled,are almost all metalworkers, and speak only Serbo-Croat. The others arenomadic, occupy a different economic niche, and speak Romanyamongst themselves. There is no intermarriage between the groups(Malcolm 1996: 116). How many ethnic categories is that, and forwhom? A more important example is the Muslims. The designationcovers categories of people who, both historically and in contemporarysociety, are sharply distinguished. Some are descendants of a Muslimaristocracy (begovi), some are peasants; they each practice different formsof Islam, maintain different lifestyles, and do not intermarry. Accordingto Lockwood (1975: 29), in the local folktale, ‘They go separately toreceive their God-given attributes. And begovi actually did share certaincharacteristics with nacije as determined by ethnicity. Social boundariesof the group were as sharp as with any ethnic group.’ Are these twoMuslim ethnic groups, or one ethnic group divided on class lines? Whathas happened to the simple, unambiguous, ethnic categories?

In order to understand phenomena such as nacije, and avoid natural-ising them, we need to open up the whole field of cultural differences andhow these relate to social divisions. Lockwood’s ethnography providesthe basis for a fuller picture and shows that in this district culturalvariation was present in many domains, from religion and language tocuisine and vernacular architecture. Each of these was seen locally as aconstituent part of nacija identity; however none of them were sufficienton their own, as cultural items, ‘to make the difference’, and none of themoperated exclusively in the field of ethnicity. Religion was very important,but there was no direct correspondence between religion and nacija inthe local system, since more than one nacija practised Orthodox Chris-tianity and more than one was Muslim. Even in the state system of narodclassification, there were not always simple correspondences, since therewere people who were Muslim by nationality, and Jehovah’s Witness byreligion (Banac 1996: 146). As for language, ‘there is no association ofthe major dialectical divisions (of Serbo-Croat) with ethnicity in Skoplje


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Polje’(Lockwood 1975: 53). Variations in costume, perhaps the mostconspicuous everyday markers of difference, in fact operate along severalaxes. For example, ‘The traditional men’s costume in Skoplje Polje isnearly identical for all three groups. It differs only in the colour of thesash … the trim … and the headgear’ (Lockwood 1975: 49). In the nextvalley everybody wore a different costume, with minor variations in trimfor each nacija. Dress codes simultaneously carry regional, gender and‘nacija’ markers – only the context determines which will be seen. Earlyin the twentieth century visitors to Sarajevo found great difficulty in dis-tinguishing between Christians and Muslims because they both wore‘oriental’ dress (Malcolm 1996: 167). In diet, there are certain food itemswhich distinguish Muslims from Christians, but overall, ‘Like manyaspects of culture, Turkish influence on eating habits follows arural–urban dichotomy rather than Moslem–Christian’ (Lockwood1975: 52). To which we can add, there are many other fields of culture,in the wider sense, where the divide between peasants and townspeoplewould be much more marked than the distinctions between peasants.

Nacija as a concept in Bosnia, like ‘ethnic group’ in anthropology, linkstogether a people and a culture. I have drawn attention to the many axesof cultural difference in rural Bosnia in order to make two points. Firstly,we need an approach which keeps in sight those social and culturalprocesses which will go unrecognised within the dominant discourse ofethnicity. Secondly, in the analysis of ethnicity and nationalism it is amistake to start with cultural difference, abstracted bits and pieces offolklore, linguistic or religious practice, and attempt to map them ontosocial groups. Instead we need a different strategy, especially for a societysuch as Yugoslavia, which has developed more than one way of cate-gorising peoples and cultures. The complexity of this situation willremain a source of confusion if we fail to distinguish between thesesystems of categorisation, and then smooth the social scienceterminology of ethnicity over the top. The premature use of the termethnicity simultaneously adds another layer of labelling, and obscurescrucial processes and distinctions in the society that we are trying tounderstand. For example, the question, ‘How many ethnic groups werethere in Yugoslavia?’ (like the question, ‘How many castes are there inIndia?’) is unanswerable unless transmuted into an inquiry about aspecific level of differentiation – and even then the answer will dependon who is asked.

I have stressed the existence of at least two levels or systems of differ-entiation. The first is the pan-Yugoslav categories regulating relationsinvolving state administration and practice: these are few in number andfixed throughout the territory. The second is those embedded in everyday


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local life – nacija in Lockwood’s ethnography. The term may not be usedthroughout Bosnia, let alone the whole of Yugoslavia, but the socialpatterns it refers to are common: ramifying networks of people whointermarry and consider they share some essential cultural practices,especially involving religion. The number of such groups will varybetween localities and over time – they are relatively fluid. Analysinglocal systems involves contextualising them in the full range of culturaldifferentiation and in relation to social practice: marriage patterns,economic relations, domestic life, ritual celebrations. It is only throughsuch an analysis that we can gain an understanding of the reasons whycertain cultural differences become important, how social divisions arereproduced or disappear over time, and for that matter why certaincommonalities (these people are all farmers and speak the samelanguage) may be unmarked or invisible.

The last and most difficult step is to analyse the interaction betweenthese local-level systems and those employed by the state, such as the sixnarod of Tito’s Yugoslavia. This interaction takes many forms. Undercommunism some policies sharpened the social divide between countryand city, attenuating other cultural differences; other policiesregenerated nationalism. For much of the time local systems may belargely self-referential – ‘We have always done things this way aroundhere’ – a set of cultural traditions, some derived from religious teaching,some of entirely local significance, ‘the origins of which are frequentlyunknown to those who practise them’ (Sorbaji, quoted in Malcolm 1996:222). But in times of nationalist polarisation, local practice draws onwider referents and, as we shall see, political movements draw heavilyon local and domestic imagery. What emerges are the kinds of identitynarrative referred to in earlier chapters: the positioning of collectivitieswithin society and within history. For a Bosnian village this involvesCatholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, and the changing position of theiradherents within Yugoslavia and globally. The wider reference cansubtly transform the local perspective and practice: long-termneighbours, with their overlapping cultural repertoires and villageloyalties, become accidentally co-resident representatives of distinctglobal religious communities.

The reader may object that, having insisted on the importance of dis-tinguishing between levels, I now want to treat them as inseparable. Itis worth clarifying what is at issue. The mistake lies in assuming thatthere is one system of cultural differentiation – which we call ethnicity –manifested both at the local level in a given pattern of social interactionand exclusion, and at the state level in the categories used in the census,the federal constitution or in administrative practice. If we assume that


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these two levels simply mirror each other, we have written politics out ofthe picture.

A valuable illustration of what is at stake comes from Sorabji (1989:38), who, in a critique of Lockwood’s use of the term ‘ethnicity’, was oneof the first to stress political processes – the way ‘national belonging’provides a new language of claims, rights and interests. There has alwaysbeen great cultural diversity in Bosnia – what was new from thenineteenth century onwards was the way these cultural groups formedthe basis for nationalist politics. In 1878 Bosnia was acquired by theAustro-Hungarian Empire during a period of renewed contestation withthe Ottoman Empire. The Bosnian population at that time had threemain components: a large number of Muslim, Serbo-Croat-speakingpeasants; an even larger number of Christian Serbo-Croat-speaking serfs;and a small elite of Muslim landlords for whom the latter worked, andwho used Ottoman Turkish in official communications and in the shariacourts (Pinson 1996a: 104–5). In the years following Austrianannexation the strategy of the Muslim elite was to promote organisa-tions which would forge unity across the class divides amongst Muslims,to petition the Austrian authorities over conscription, to champion thelegal and religious rights of Muslims and, by the early twentieth century,to form a Muslim political party. The result was a hardening of theboundaries between Christians and Muslims, and the political fusion ofthe Muslim population, who for the first time found themselves subjectsof a Christian government. The Bosnian parliament became divided on‘national’ lines, despite the Austrian authorities’ earlier hopes for theemergence of a Bosnian national identity which would encompassreligious differences.

The crucial aspect of this ‘politicisation of difference’ is the way inwhich local-level social relations and ‘systems of difference’ aretransformed and simplified by their incorporation into a state-levelpolitical movement. The discrete sets of relationships within villages andneighbourhoods were aggregated together, ‘homologised’ in a discoursewhich constructed society as made up of separate (and sometimes antag-onistic) nations. Ethnogenesis, and ethnicity more generally, are bestreserved as terms to describe this politicisation of difference, and theinteraction between local and state systems. This kind of transformationtends to be cumulative, and the differences harden; but this is notinevitable, and in the twentieth century there are processes leading tothe softening of boundaries, as well as periods of cataclysmic polarisa-tion. The alternative viewpoint sees ethnic groups as given, and thenseeking political expression; it shades into the extreme view that Balkanhistory is a saga of tribes fighting over territory. Since one of the


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objectives of recent wars has been to make local and state systemscongruent through ‘ethnic cleansing’, the use of terms which collapsethese levels at the beginning of an analysis is a poor basis for under-standing the politics of this period.

Analysis of these political processes has to include the history ofcategories such as Serb, Croat and Muslim; they vary considerably overtime. For example, the Austrian policy of promoting a Bosnian nationalidentity was in part directed at countering the claims that the Muslimswere really Serbs or Croats – claims which could form the basis forterritorial annexation. Even in the early years of communist rule, theMuslims were still expected to declare themselves as Croat or Serb bynationality, since Muslim was not yet a narod category in the Yugoslavstate. The historical paradox of this is that the Bosnian Muslims could nothave been Croat or Serb before they converted because ‘no such distinctcategories existed in Bosnia in the period before Islamicisation’ (Malcolm1996: 199–200). The use of the category ‘Croat’ is itself complex. Bringa(1993) has suggested that within Bosnia the term was not used for localCatholics, but referred to inhabitants of Croatia. In Croatia itself, the termCroat includes the descendants of Hungarian, German and many otherpredominantly Catholic settlers (Despalatovic 1993; Malcolm 1996). Theoverall history of state policy shows the consolidation of religious cate-gorisation in legal and economic practice from the Ottoman millet systemonwards, followed by a nineteenth-century shift such that religiouscategories became national categories. But it was a shift which leftambiguity, as we see both in the case of Catholics and in the 1971definition of a new nationality: the ‘ethnic Muslims of Bosnia’.

What I have referred to as a local-level system had religious affiliationat its core, though not everybody in Bosnia who shared the same religionwas considered to be part of the same nacija. A nacija was a group ofpeople who were largely endogamous, gave their children a distinctiveset of names, celebrated the same religious festivities and rites de passage,shared some distinctive features of diet and dress, domestic organisationand popular culture, who resided together and who organised labourexchanges. Most of a rural person’s life was conducted with people of thesame nacija, and when they moved outside this world, to the market forexample, they expected their affiliation to be clear to strangers (Lockwood1975: 49). They engaged with people from different nacija when theywent to market, worked in the lumber industry, the local factory or thefarmers’ co-operative, enrolled in higher education, joined theCommunist Party, or became labour migrants in Germany. A dry list,but a revealing contrast, and we shall come back to it.


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There were two overlapping sets of social relations within which thisidentity was generated. First the domestic sphere, where certain culturalforms (names, rites of passage, diet) were substantially permeated byreligious practice and could not be combined in the event of a ‘mixed’marriage. The expectation that the domestic world is uniform, and that‘you marry your own’, reproduced over time, meant that kin groups anddescent lines belonged to the same nacija. The second context was that ofneighbourhoods – the relatively bounded world of reciprocity, labourexchanges, borrowing; the world of the informal or the non-monetisedeconomy; and also that of reputations, of trust (and betrayal). In thelatter context it was very similar to forms of village patriotismdocumented from other parts of Europe: Tuscan patriarchs used to say‘take women and [buy] oxen from your own place’. It is a world wherepeople prefer ‘to deal with their own’, or with ‘our people’. There is amutually reinforcing process operating: your people are those you trust,you trust only your people.

Examining the social context of ethnic identity clarifies the ways inwhich it is shaped by specific local conditions and by general social trans-formations. As economic differentiation and social mobility increase, theimportance of these divisions – indeed their continued existence – is opento question. They are not incompatible with city life, as becomes clearfrom Sorabji’s (1989: 67) description of a Muslim neighbourhood inSarajevo. Nevertheless, in the 1980s more than three million ofYugoslavia’s 22 million inhabitants lived in ‘mixed’ households(Woodward 1995: 36), which means that, given the generation lag andthe strength of the countryside, there must have been a tendency forthem to break down in an urban environment. The industrialisationprogramme initiated by the communist regime was like a great motorgenerating mobility and creating urban environments where thequestion of baptismal names and when to celebrate Easter werebecoming less important than other kinds of identity and lifestyle. Butthis process was checked and reversed. Already, by the late 1960s,migratory flows were becoming more internal to each republic, and insome cases this would lead to greater urban homogeneity. Denich (1993;2000: 44) has some interesting comments on how Belgrade seemed toevolve from a cosmopolitan federal capital to a Serb capital between hervisits in 1972 and 1987. The more dramatic slide in living standards asthe economy collapsed in the 1980s created widespread economicinsecurity and blocked aspirations. Rising unemployment, the erosionof welfare benefits, the pressure on young people to return to the villageand the increased dependence on subsistence agriculture took manypeople back to a rural world, and to a generalised dependence on kin,


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patronage links and an informal economy which had been structuredaround nacija identities and divisions.

Yugoslavia was a highly complex society – in the ways in whichcultural diversity was manifested, in the kinds of antagonisms thatemerged, and in the ways in which identity was constructed (for examplein the relative importance of descent). I have suggested that in all caseswe need to distinguish between state and local levels of organisation, andexamine their interaction (see also Bougarel 1996: 98, 104). The locallevel, in Bosnia, involves nacija: elsewhere in Yugoslavia the term itselfmay not be used or may have different connotations from those reportedby Lockwood, Bringa and Sorabji (Mursic 2000: 68), but we verycommonly find named kin and neighbourhood groups which havesimilar sociological and cultural characteristics. In Bosnia, nacija arethose who do things together, in a context where there are many waysof doing things. For many the tolerance of plurality in Bosnia made it theplace where the Yugoslav ideals were most fully realised (Weine 2000:404). Some intellectuals and politicians thought that such heightenedand reflexive tension – one that had not sought resolution in eithersegregation or assimilation – was also a model of multiculturalism forthe rest of Europe.

Prior to the wars the degree of local mixing varied greatly, as didpatterns of localised hostilities. Yugoslav towns in general were hetero-geneous; by contrast in much of rural Yugoslavia villages tended to haveonly one nacija (to be ‘monoethnic’). Even in Bosnia, where many villageshad two nacije, in the 1970s feuds and hostility normally occurredbetween those of the same nacija, or in the rivalry between villages of thesame nacija. Bax’s description of a lawless part of Herzegovina revealsevery kind of feud, not least between co-religionists (Bax 1995; 2000).For the national picture, one well-informed observer reckoned that‘Interethnic hostility is no more highly developed in Yugoslavia than inmost parts of the world and a good deal less than in some’ (Lockwood1975: 28). We should not portray rural Bosnia as permanentlyharmonious, since conflicts did occur, and were remembered. It isenough to insist that antagonism was not natural or inevitable, since ifcultural differences automatically generated hostility and violence, everymetropolis in the world would be a smoking ruin.

The wars of the 1990s were not produced by spontaneous outbreaksof hatred, but by political strategies. The Granada television film We areall neighbours is a disturbing documentary on the effect of that war on aBosnian village where there had been harmonious social relationsbetween Catholics and Muslims. A young woman who worked in afactory which recruited from many villages remarked in an interview


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that she hated those who spoke of ‘our people’ meaning ‘our nationality’.A few weeks later everything had been torn apart.

DISINTEGRATION

In 1990 the Yugoslav state collapsed. The federal government ceased tocontrol the army (the JNA) so that the various armed forces, theterritorial defence units and the police were operating independently.The Central Bank ceased to have any control over financial policy, debtor the currency. Yugoslavia’s internal borders became contested andmilitarised zones, while many of its international borders became porousto illegal trade. The rules of law and citizenship which had regulated thesociety for 45 years evaporated.

In their place came republican governments, led by people who hadmade careers in the Communist Party and the state bureaucracies, theapparatchiki, who had either broken with the party to construct their ownnationalist movements, like Tudjman in Croatia, or had stayed withinit, like Milosevic in Serbia. They were linked through patronage ties tomanagers in the media, industry and finance. Milosevic, who alwaysfaced substantial internal opposition within Serbia, denounced the ‘unac-ceptable face of communism’, its bureaucratic apparatus, and then atthe end of the Cold War moved all the regional assets of the CommunistParty into his newly-created Serbian Socialist Party. His most destabil-ising move was the claim that Kosovo, where 90 per cent of thepopulation were ethnic Albanians, was the heartland of the Serb people.Support was mobilised through a series of rallies at the Field of Blackbirds,the site of a battle between Serbian and Turkish armies in 1389. In 1990the Serbian government unilaterally abrogated the constitutional rightsof the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and incorporatedthem into the Serbian Republic. The other main power base incommunist Yugoslavia had been the army; proud and well resourced, itwas the fourth largest army in Europe, but lost coherence in thetransition. The majority of its officers were Serbs and the subject ofmanipulation by the government in Serbia before 1991. In the wars itshed equipment to Slovenia and Croatia, was purged four times (Vasic1996) and, as a much reduced force, came under the control of theSerbian government.

In 1990 elections were held in the republics, and these confirmed thestrength of nationalist politics – though scarcely unanimously, sinceTudjman only got 42 per cent of the vote. It is one thing to ask peoplewho they want to run a republican government, but another to ask themwhether they want to abolish Yugoslavia. Most observers agree that in


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1990 there was an overwhelming majority for the continued existenceof Yugoslavia in a federal or confederal form, but no pan-Yugoslavelections were ever held. In the summer of 1991 Slovenia announced itssecession from Yugoslavia: it was the smallest and wealthiest republic,with a strong, exporting industrial sector and international borders withItaly and Austria. It was Catholic and claimed ‘ethnic’ homogeneity(though 25 per cent of its workforce came from Bosnia and Kosovo).What could be more reasonable than that it extricate itself from acollapsing communist regime, and from the backward southern regions,and realise its European destiny as a nation-state? A brief militaryengagement with the Yugoslav National Army left 50 dead and Sloveniafree, and able to use its own currency, which had been secretly printedin Austria.

Croatia announced its independence at the same time, and bothcountries were granted recognition by various European powers.However, the military consequences in Croatia were far more serious.Croatia had a substantial minority of Serbs, and the Belgrade governmenthad announced that if Croatia wished to leave the federation, its Serbianpopulation had the right to remain. Some of these people were fullyintegrated into professional life in the cities, though they soon foundthemselves disenfranchised. Others were rural people who had settledcenturies earlier on the 1,000-mile militarised frontier between theHabsburg and Ottoman Empires, and maintained a strong militarytradition. Fighting in these frontier areas involved the army and irregularmilitias; it included the destruction of Vukovar on the eastern border, thesystematic killing and expulsion of civilian populations from strategicareas; rape, torture, and detention camps, which became death camps.United Nations troops were sent in to maintain ceasefires in 1992.

Following a US initiative, Bosnia was recognised as an independentstate in April 1992, but its admission to the UN more or less coincidedwith its destruction. There was never much chance that it would escapethe catastrophe. It was highly integrated into the Yugoslav economyand, since 1938, had been chosen as the strategic site for militaryindustry – the ‘unconquerable’ heartland of Yugoslavia, containingbetween 60 and 80 per cent of the army’s physical assets (Woodward1995: 259). Croatia and Serbia had decided on its dismembermentamongst themselves, and the war was well prepared. Sarajevo wasbesieged; Mostar, that other symbol of a now unacceptable ‘multi-ethnic’society, suffered constant artillery bombardment. Despite the presenceof UN troops and endless ceasefires, war and terror broke up the ‘leopardskin’ of ethnic co-residence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The fighting was athree-sided contest (Muslim, Croat and Serb) and involved regular


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armies, militias and mercenaries. In 1995 the Muslim forces, inprovisional alliance with Croatian forces, pushed back Serb forces frommuch of the north of Bosnia, creating a new wave of (Serb) refugees. TheCroats were receiving funding for equipment from the diasporacommunity, and spent $5.5 billion on arms and on assistance fromretired members of the US military (Glenny 1996: 283; Kaldor 1999:46). It was at this point that the US exerted its greatest pressure for anegotiated settlement, the latest of a long line of maps partitioning Bosniainto separate territorial entities was drawn up, and the DaytonAgreement was signed in October 1995. A UN presence remained in thearea and a central government was created on paper, but its presencewas highly limited.

Between 1992 and 1995 around 260,000 people were killed inBosnia-Herzegovina (Kaldor 1999: 31), and 3.5 million Yugoslavsbecame refugees within Yugoslavia itself, or scattered across westernEurope. At the end of the fighting, much of the economy was in ruins,and living standards had plummeted, except for the military. Wars –fought to break up a federal state which was considered ‘artificial’ andusher in a bright new world of clean-cut nation-states – left behind aneven more artificial patchwork of crippled states, para-states, protec-torates and lawless enclaves; states which rely on their neighbours, orinternational agencies, or both, to provide rudimentary policing andmuch of their defence force; states which have virtually no system oftaxation in operation, whose currencies do not circulate; lands wherethe Deutschmark is the only money that counts. States with a publicsector, a rule of law and normal patterns of accumulation can be rebuilt,and in places this is happening; but they are expensive, and since thereare those – both inside and outside Yugoslavia – who prosper in theabsence of a state, there is nothing inevitable about the rebuildingprocess. The war in Kosovo and fighting in Macedonia in 1999 were justthe more visible parts of continuing instability.

In order to make some sense of this devastation I shall look at twoissues in the concluding sections of this chapter. The first is theinteraction between the government forces within Yugoslavia and whatis called, for shorthand, the international community. The second is thestrategy of these same political forces within the republics: how they con-solidated their own positions and redistributed wealth within society bythe calculated use of violence to polarise social relations on ethnic lines.

INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS

In the speeches of western leaders and in the media, the dominant rep-resentation of events in Yugoslavia has been that violence was a direct


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product of ethnic hatred, which had deep historical roots and explodedafter the collapse of communism. Western initiatives were directedtowards containing the fighting and providing a framework to help thesequarrelsome people to negotiate a settlement. A variant on this repres-entation was that the violence was caused by the aggression of the Serbs,led by Slobodan Milosevic, one of history’s psychopaths. These accountsrest on cod history (‘some things never change’) and cod psychology(‘war is produced by aggression’). They tell us something about howwestern leaders set about obtaining domestic consensus for their policies;they tell us little about the social and political processes in Yugoslavia,or about the way in which the United States and the European Unionwere instrumental in shaping the political forces which emerged withthe breakdown of communism. The increasingly nationalisticgovernments of the republics developed their political and their militarystrategies in relation to direct western intervention and interpretationof the west’s intentions.

Various scholars have contested the dominant representations of theseprocesses and drawn attention to western complicity in the disaster: themost detailed and merciless is Susan Woodward’s Balkan Tragedy (1995).At the end of the Cold War, with the west supporting any kind of anti-communism and the European Union expanding, some of the rulingforces emerging in a decentralised and crisis-ridden Yugoslavia wantedindependence for their republics and access to western credits. Thestrategy to achieve this was to argue that the republics representednations which had the right to self-determination. The Yugoslav consti-tution, though highly flawed, addressed the plurality of the existingsociety and created many layers of rights: those of Yugoslav citizens,those of republics, and those of nations and minorities. Internationalorganisations which encouraged the break-up of Yugoslavia on thegrounds of national self-determination were opening up two immenselydangerous and intractable problems. The first was that of how manynations there were in Yugoslavia. In legal terms the six narod were theconstitutive nations of a state which it was proposed should be abolished.The status of one of them (the ethnic Muslims of Bosnia) was extremelycomplex, while there were many other non-constitutive peoples –Hungarians, Albanians, Gypsies – whose rights in the new order wouldneed to be defined. The second explosive issue was the relationshipbetween designated nations and territory – the foundation stone for thecreation of new states. If Yugoslavia no longer existed, and the rights ofnations constituted the supreme principle, then Hungary or Albaniacould claim the right to annex territory where their nationals wereresident. More seriously, the rights of Croatians to form a nation-state


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and the right of the Republic of Croatia to become an independent statewere two very different propositions. To confuse them, and use theborders of the republics as a blue-print for new international borders inthe name of national rights was both a gross confusion and highly irre-sponsible. If nationality was the supreme principle, then borders couldbe open to negotiation. Finally, a decision to solve Yugoslavia’s problemsby disaggregating it on national lines would destroy Bosnia, sinceBosnian was not a nationality, though Serb and Croat were.

Many outside observers believed that there was a strong case forkeeping Yugoslavia together in 1990–91, and that making availablefinancial resources would reduce economic insecurity, increase thelegitimacy of the federal government and allow the time for democraticorganisations to emerge. If federal or confederal solutions failed, it wouldstill take time to work out a new pattern of states and their borders, andfind out who wanted to remain in a rump Yugoslavia. The EU wasshaping policy on those lines, including the Badinter Commission whichwas working on the criteria (democratic rights, protection of minorities)which would be a precondition for international recognition of successorstates. The important point was that there could not be a piecemealsolution, and nor should it be rushed. In the event this was preciselywhat happened.

At the Maastricht Treaty meetings of December 1991 the EU brokewith the recommendations of its own commission and agreed torecognise Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. This was doneunder German pressure, and appears to have involved a complex deal,buying off British reservations with an opt-out on key aspects of the EUharmonisation policy (the social chapter), and rewarding Greek acqui-escence with a veto on the recognition of Macedonia. In reality theSlovenian and Croatian governments had been receiving covert supportfor an independence strategy for a number of years – from Germany,Austria and the Vatican. Tudjman’s party was receiving substantial aidfrom the Croatian diaspora in Australia and North America, many ofthem exiles from the Ustashe regime of 1945, keen to take up theirhistorical mission where it had been broken off.

Recognition of Slovenia and Croatia – even secret support by a majorexternal power – destroyed any federal solution to the crisis, and doomedBosnia to a vicious war of dismemberment. The impact of externalagencies did not finish there. At a later stage, as part of the Vance–Owenpeace plan, maps were published delineating that dismemberment of theterritory on ‘ethnic’ lines, accompanied by the impression that thesemight be revised – and this stimulated a further round of territorial war.Such maps show ethnicity in vivid colours: no other kind of belonging is


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visible in them, nor were representatives of non-nationalist politicalcultures invited to the talks. This does not mean that all the sufferingexperienced in Yugoslavia is the result of western intervention, or that allthe interventions were pernicious (roughly the argument of Gowan1999). Nor does it mean that international intervention followed a clearand consistent policy objective: the evidence from the early 1990s is ofconfusion, misunderstanding and inconsistency – though certaingovernments did know what they wanted to happen. Since 1995, andparticularly in Kosovo, the situation may have changed, and interna-tional policy in ex-Yugoslavia may no longer essentially be concernedwith what happens in the successor states; instead it has become a regionwhere various post-Cold War issues are fought over and clarified: therelationship between the United States and Russia; the new role forNATO; the coherence and autonomy of the European Union (seeBlackburn 1999). Those issues are being fought about over the heads ofthe Yugoslavs.

VIOLENCE AND ETHNICITY

The wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, for all their global importance,were in the end local wars. They were not fought between states (Bosniaagainst Serbia); nor were they conventional wars between armies,though the fire power of a conventional army was sometimes decisive ingaining or holding land. They were fought in the main by civilians, andby neighbours, in the villages and small towns of the Serb-populatedareas in Croatia and Bosnia. The dominant groups in the post-communist governments sought to retain control over resources,territory and populations, proclaiming themselves the defenders ofpeoples who were (all) under threat. Given the continued existence ofother traditions of solidarity in Yugoslavia, the ruling forces had toconsolidate their power by dramatising a threat to the people that wasimmanent and devastating. Indeed they made it real, and the use of forcewas intrinsic to their political strategies.

As armed conflict grew, the character of the regimes and the intereststhey represented changed. The formal economy was devastated – duringthe war Bosnia’s industrial output fell to 10 per cent of its pre-war level(Kaldor 1999: 49) – while swathes of previously important manufac-turing and commercial activity disappeared. Their destruction and theresulting unemployment destroyed the revenue base, which in turnundermined the whole public sector. Millions left the country. In the endthose who possessed weapons – and skills in the political use of violence– came to control the manufacturing base which survived (chiefly that


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producing armaments) and most forms of commerce. Young men wereattracted to the militias for the spoils of war – not least to loot thedestroyed houses. Those carrying arms controlled the trade in petrol,cigarettes, guns, drugs and alcohol. Military hardware itself, includingtanks, was sometimes traded for deutchmarks between rival armies(Judah 1997: 250). Some of the fighting around Sarajevo was not for‘ethnic’ gain, but for control of the strategic smuggling routes throughwhich ran the immensely profitable black market supply lines into thecity. Many of the larger towns developed a gangster economy, while inrural areas there remained farmers producing food, and armed forces.Some observers have borrowed the vocabulary of feudalism to describesuch a society (peasants and warlords), though it can also be seen as aversion of post-modernity.

The consolidation of these regimes in Serbia and Croatia involved twomain stages. The first was a media campaign to convince the people of theimmediate horrors that they faced unless they armed in defence.Television had been taken over early by the governments in therepublics, and by 1991 ceased to have any pan-Yugoslavia coverage. Itwas used to replay the Second World War, showing scenes of CroatUstashe attacking Serbs, Chetniks or communist partisans attackingCroats. Footage from the war was intercut with scenes from the present,including the disinterment of Second World War corpses from caves anddeath-pits. There was an overwhelming assumption about the historicalcontinuity of the nations, and of the conflict itself – above all claimingthat 1991 involved the same forces that had fought in 1941–45. Thecommunist government had suppressed discussion of this period; now itall came into the light, and Yugoslavia filled up with the tombs ofunknown warriors.

The second stage was the achievement of ethnically homogeneousstates by moving people or borders. This was achieved partly throughnon-violent means – sacking state employees who were not from thedominant narod (Serbs in Croatia, Albanians in Kosovo), harassing anddisenfranchising minorities (Hayden 1996). The second strategy was theuse of terror, and when violence finally occurred it had been wellprepared. Arms were sent to co-nationals in key areas and stockpiled.Militias were recruited – the most effective and notorious were Serbian,but they were also present in Croatia and Bosnia. The most famous wasrun by Arkan, a smuggler – reputedly also employed by the Yugoslavsecurity forces to kill émigrés – and owner of the fan club of the BelgradeRed Star football team. He recruited fighters from the football club andthe criminal underworld, and was supplied directly by the governmentwith all his military needs.


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There were various techniques for installing a reign of terror. In1991–92, forces operating in Serbian villages in the Krajina wouldcommit atrocities against Croats, provoke counter-attacks, and thenbring in the JNA to take command of the district, thus bringing it underSerb control. The militias could also operate in the absence of the regulararmy, moving into a district with a mixed population, killing leaders andradicalising the population. In these contexts what mattered was notthe abstract narod, but the dense local pattern of kinship and neigh-bourhood, which was forced to close ranks. A Croat, living in a villagewhere a Croatian militia had killed Muslims or burnt them out, wasforced into self-defence, and also into dependency on the militias.Cleansing destroys the social networks within which people meet; it isthe extreme conclusion of the process of ethnicisation of social relationsanalysed in the previous chapter. ‘The turning point in the dissolutionof Yugoslavia as it affected endangered individuals, according to theirown reports, was when they saw the necessity as families or localities toresort to guns in self-defence’ (Woodward 1995: 391, 483). Fear is thekey, and it was the militias who generated it, creating insecurity in orderto sell security. Later the region filled up with people who, having losttheir families and their homes, had nothing further to lose, and thedynamic changed. In some cases local conflicts pre-existed the war, buttheir escalation and devastation were the result of changes in powerrelations at a much higher level.

The process now called ‘ethnic cleansing’ occurred in areas with mixedpopulations, and this has led to a rather simple conclusion: that it is amanifestation of ethnic hatred (or that ‘these people just don’t want tolive together’). However, virtually all published first-hand accountsindicate that terror was not ubiquitous in mixed areas, and that ithappened for military reasons – where there were industrial assets orsupply corridors. Cleansing was initiated as a means to achieve militaryends, though once started other factors came into play. Secondly, someareas remained peaceful even when surrounded by fighting. In theabsence of detailed ethnographic studies we have to rely on the evidenceof perceptive journalists passing through. Misha Glenny remarks on theSerbian communities in eastern Croatia who came from ‘old slavonianfamilies who had no quarrel with the old Croatian families in the region’(Glenny 1996: 107–8). The contrast is made with the atmosphere invillages established after 1945 by transplanted Serbs from the Krajinaand Croats from areas in western Herzegovina, which had seen bitterfighting in the 1940s.

After the militias or local armed extremists began killing, the use ofviolence usually spiralled. It included the rape of women – a frequent


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occurrence in any battle-zone, but one which took on a particularsalience and horror in the Yugoslav conflicts. Many areas hadpatriarchal honour codes which had been reinforced by the collapse ofstate authority and the militarisation of the economy. Armed menguarded their own homes and those of the nacija neighbourhood, withits womenfolk. In this localised and highly personalised conflict, thekilling of a man or the rape of a woman carried a parallel significance interms of a group’s ability to defend and sustain itself. More extremeabuses have been documented: camps where Muslim women were heldand raped repeatedly, often until pregnant.

In the worst cases – and there were hundreds – the whole targetpopulation of a town or district were killed or driven out. Their homeswere looted and burned; libraries, monuments, mosques or churcheswere destroyed so that no physical evidence remained of their existence.The most accurate verb I know for this process is the Italian annientare,‘to render into nothing’. A recurring practice (see Bax 1995) was thedynamiting of tombs and the flattening of graveyards: the classic ‘placesof memory’ where individuals were connected to their ancestral lines, tocollectivities and to territory. This was desecration – the destruction ofwhat the enemy held to be sacred, essential to its being. It was also anattack on those objects which were central in the practices throughwhich were constructed identities based on historical continuity. Thesesymbolic connections had become apparent a few years earlier when, in1989, the bones of Prince Lazar, the leader of the battle against the Turksat Kosovo field in 1389, were exhumed and paraded through the SerbianRepublic: one of the undead who moved through Yugoslav society inthis period.

CONCLUSION

Noel Malcolm, with controlled irony, reproduces the standard phrasesused by western leaders to characterise the conflict in Yugoslavia. JohnMajor told the House of Commons in 1993 that ‘The biggest singleelement behind what has happened in Bosnia is the collapse of the SovietUnion and of the disciplines that that exerted over the ancient hatreds ofold Yugoslavia’ (Malcolm 1996: xx). The media reported that a civil warhad broken out, fighting had flared up, while law and order had brokendown. The declared objective of the Foreign Office was to do nothing thatwould ‘prolong the fighting’ or ‘hinder the peace process’. ‘The war wasseen as essentially a military problem, caused by something called“violence”, which “flared up” on “both sides”’ (Malcolm 1996: 242).These influential representations of the war, with their extraordinary


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reifications, contain no political agents, no sense of the political purposesof the actors in the Yugoslav tragedy.

Historically Yugoslavia has been a military, religious and commercialcross-roads; a region of repeated population movements and a countryof unusual cultural diversity. Some of this diversity came with the con-struction of states and empires within the geographical region, whilesome is associated with, and remembered in terms of, the historicalcontinuity of distinct peoples. Nationalism is the political articulation ofdifference, not the difference itself, and over time the differences and thearticulation may change. Some had believed that Yugoslavia itself as astate was defined by its plurality, or that plurality was a defining featureof being Bosnian. Indeed, a society where 83 per cent of the populationspoke a close variant of the same language, and where the main lines ofcultural division were religious, though the state itself was secular, hada good basis on which to consolidate a plural polity. In recent Yugoslavhistory it has been through war that nationalism has been consolidated.

By 1990 the accumulating failures of Yugoslav communism had cometo a head. As a ‘decentralised totalitarian regime’ its economy had lostefficiency and gone into reverse; democratic reforms were blocked, andwith them any chance of mobilising pan-Yugoslav opposition to theregime. Civic conceptions of citizenship were entering into crisis as thefederation weakened and rights based on narod membership came todominate in the new centres of power in the republics. Nationalismreplaced communism as the dominant political and cultural movement– either as an offensive strategy to control people and territory, or as adefensive reaction to aggression. To be effective it had to mobilise existingcultural divides and everyday experience, and to tap into the world ofkinship and neighbourhood.

In the political language of cultural nationalism in the 1980s and the electoralcampaigns of 1990 … the most commonly-used word politically, from Sloveniato Serbia, was hearth. The focal point of a home or homestead, hearth becomes ametaphor for property, community, citizenship and patriotism, all in one.(Woodward 1995: 237)

It is at the level of daily practices such as those associated with kinshipthat nationalism as a construction of identity, continuity and differencebecomes powerful. But nationalism is not kinship, though it may involvethe incorporation of kinship into a state-level discourse of race. Thedynamics of this situation are best captured by Woodward (1995: 18):‘To explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn thestory upside down and begin at its end.’


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SOURCES

The preparation of this chapter involved sifting a much wider literaturethan for the other case studies, but I am aware that it is still very selectiveand that important new work is emerging all the time. There are radicallydifferent interpretations of the historical processes leading to the break-up of Yugoslavia. States are both normal and ‘artificial’: there is no statein Europe whose territorial boundaries and composition have notchanged or been seriously challenged in the course of the twentiethcentury. There are conflicting views about whether Yugoslavia was‘viable’ after 1989, given its internal dynamics; the chapter is writtenfrom the conviction (not shared by all) that there were more losers thanwinners from the manner of its disintegration, and that that will be truefor a long time to come. For the international dimension of this processI would strongly recommend Woodward (1995); for nationalistdynamics, Brubaker (1996: 55–76); for the internal dynamics ofYugoslavia under communism, Dyker and Vejvoda (1996); for anoverview of the Bosnian war, Kaldor (1999). Glenny (1996) is full ofinsight and information on everything from the villagers who refused tofight to the evolution of international policy. Silber and Little’s The Deathof Yugoslavia (1995) and the BBC television series of the same namedocument the descent into war with some extraordinary interviews withthe protagonists.

The ‘viability’ of Yugoslavia is connected to a second controversial setof issues around the relative importance and stability of the national and‘ethnic’ divisions within the country. It is easy to argue that becausethese divisions are central to contemporary politics, and conceived indeeply historical ways, they have always been present in the same places– the political bedrock under the surface. With the collapse of the stateand local institutions, forms of collective action and solidarity which cutacross ‘ethnic’ boundaries are remembered (if at all) as moments whenpeople’s true identities and interests were temporarily masked. Thecontrary view is that the boundaries are porous, shifting, present in somesocial contexts and absent in others; that they interact with other socialdivisions, and are dramatically reshaped by changes such as the declineof the Ottoman Empire, the end of feudalism or socialist economic policy.My own understanding of Yugoslav diversity has been informed by thosewho study the history of societies, not of nations (such as Dyker 1972;Malcolm 1996, 1998; Pinson 1996b); by work on peasant politics andthe agrarian parties (Bideleux and Jeffries 1998; Jackson 1966; Mitrany1951); and by the work of the anthropologists (Bowman 1994; Denich1994a, 1994b) and others listed below. The disagreements about the


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importance of these boundaries are crucially also disagreements aboutthe characteristics of ethnicity and nationalism, which is why theconceptual discussion was necessary.

Ethnographic research is essential to our understanding of theseprocesses, but the variety of Yugoslavia compels specialisation. It wouldbe possible to pursue the analysis through the ethnography of Serbia,from Halpern and Halpern (1972) through to Anzulovic (1998) and vande Port (1999), but I have concentrated on Bosnia because of itssymbolic role in relation to the Yugoslav federation, and becauseeverything was at stake there. There is less information on theinvolution of Yugoslav society in the 1980s, and it is striking how muchthat is now considered inevitable was not anticipated by even the mostattentive and informed observers. Lockwood (1975) is very useful, partlybecause he was not primarily concerned with ethnic divisions. Sorabji(1989, 1993, 1995) and Bringa (1993, 1996) deal with the more recentperiod. The collection of essays in a special issue of Anthropology of EastEurope Review (1993, vol. 11) is invaluable. It forms the basis for Halpernand Kideckel (2000), though there are significant additions, omissions(Olsen, Bringa) and changes in emphasis in some of the contributions,and this makes referencing difficult. Both collections show that bitterdisagreements about what was happening can be found amongst pro-fessional anthropologists. One of the most harrowing and informativesources on the destruction itself is the Granada TV film, We are allneighbours, made with Tone Bringa.


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8 OCCITANIA AND LOMBARDY: POPULISM RED AND WHITE

The last two chapters, on the Basque country and Yugoslavia, examinednationalist movements attempting to create new states throughsecession. There are many other kinds of nationalist politics, from theeveryday, ‘banal’ (Billig 1995) articulation of national frames ofreference in established states, to the struggle for greater autonomy bymore inclusionary nationalist movements: Scotland and Catalonia aremuch-quoted examples. Two case studies cannot represent the whole,though they can serve as the basis for questioning certain kinds of gen-eralisation – about the contrast between nationalist movements inwestern and eastern Europe, or the status of the contrast between ‘civic’and ‘ethnic’ forms of nationalism. In the first part of this chapter I shalldraw out some of the common political processes which have emergedfrom these two case studies, especially those leading to the affirmationof nationhood.

The remainder of the chapter explores two political movements whichcombine class and nationalist themes, one in the ‘red south’ of Franceand another in the ‘white north’ of Italy. Each of them articulates thedistinctive qualities and rights of those who live in a particular place; atthe same time each movement understands local societies to be stratified,and stratified in politically significant ways. They may describe this inthe language of class, or as a more generic opposition between the peopleand the rulers. In some contexts this opposition is transposed intoterritorial terms, so that those of the locality or the region are ‘the people’while the rulers are identified with the forces of the national economyor the state, external but encompassing. The politics of place, belongingand rootedness have a very long history in Europe, and haveundoubtedly become more prominent in the last 20 years, partly inreaction to the dominant neo-liberal models of ‘dislocation’, labourmarket flexibility and mobility. They surfaced in many differentmovements, and although these two shorter case studies cannotdocument their full complexity, they can reveal the convergencies and

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divergencies between them, and the slippery slope between the rights oflocal people and the politics of exclusion and xenophobia. One way inwhich these more hybrid movements have been analysed is through theconcept of populism, and the concluding section of the chapter willdiscuss the significance of this term.

THE MAKING OF NATIONS

Debates on the interpretation of nationalism have frequently pitchedthose who stress the historical antiquity of culturally distinct peoplesagainst those who stress the construction of nations by political elites ina recent historical period. The discussion of political processes in the lasttwo chapters has formulated the problem in a slightly different way, byfocusing on the interaction between local and higher-level systems.Culturally, certain kinds of everyday experience, particularly thosearising from the sphere of domestic and neighbourhood relations, havebeen encompassed and reformulated within a larger interpretative frame– that of a people with a distinct culture. Socially, certain lines of division,patterns of inclusion and exclusion intrinsic to the operation of theinformal economy, to marriage patterns or religious observance, havebeen hardened and totalised into the boundaries of the nation – a processwhich in its most extreme form has become known as ethnic cleansing.These cultural and social processes are connected – inevitably so, sinceculture – in its widest sense (forms of knowledge, understanding and rep-resentation) is not free-floating, but embedded in social relations.

A concern with interactions runs through much recent work: betweenpopular culture and the work of nationalist intellectuals; between ‘ethnicgroups’ and modern nations. A. D. Smith has written on the need forinterpretations of the building of nations which balance ‘the influenceof the ethnic past and the impact of nationalist activity’ (1995: 16). In hiscritique of both those who see the nation as an unchanging essence andthose who see it as a modern and ad-hoc invention, he draws attentionto the role of nationalists in the ‘rediscovery and the reinterpretation ofthe ethnic past and through it the regeneration of their nationalcommunity’ (1995: 3). There is much that I would agree with in hiscomments on how the historical narratives of nations emerge, and ontheir popular resonance, but overall the approach developed in these lasttwo chapters has a different emphasis. We have seen the need to lookcritically at the connections between peoples and cultures, and the needto look at the power field within which national narratives areconstructed. The material has also suggested not the regeneration ofcommunities but the development of new social boundaries (including

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states), legitimated through a discourse which selects out a particularrange of cultural markers and weaves them into a narrative of theunbroken history of a people.

In both the Basque country and Bosnia nationalism came to have pre-dominance over all other political questions, though it did so in verydifferent historical contexts and through very different forms of mobil-isation. Nevertheless there are common themes, and I want to drawtogether some of the comments on the processes of social and culturalpolarisation which have characterised political life in the two cases. Inboth accounts I gave details of local forms of sociality: the voluntary asso-ciations of co-operating neighbours (auzoak) and leisure-time activity(caudrillas) in the Basque country; the nacija of Bosnia. These were themore overt aspects of a general process of social inclusion and exclusion,operating in domestic, kinship and neighbourhood relations and in theinformal economy. They built into a definition of who ‘we’ are (‘us fromhere’) and into a moral map of trust, intimacy and distance, versions ofwhich were found very frequently in peasant Europe. They also incor-porated experiences and relationships which became central to thenarrative of nationhood, of the home and homeland – the frameworkwithin which this nationalist version of the good life was imagined – thehearth-fires, the warmth, solidarity and enduring relationships betweenpeoples and places.

This is not, however, an argument for simple continuities in nation-building, nor for the primacy of ‘primordial’ ties: this is after all a veryparticular and romantic vision of the good life. These networks of ruralproducers were not the whole picture – we need to build in otherdimensions. Rural households were part of a social world which includedtowns and markets; they had to wrestle with landlords and merchants,often people who spoke the same language and practised the samereligion as themselves. They lived through periods of rural depressionand industrial growth, which in the long run drew the majority of thepopulation into urban centres and a monetised economy. For many suchpeople, in many periods, rural lifestyles signified poverty, discomfort,backwardness and economic uncertainty; the future was the factory, aflat and a wage. These had never been homogenous societies, but newdivisions of labour and different kinds of migration added other layers ofsocial and cultural differentiation. But in both societies the ‘motor’ ofindustrial development was not a smooth machine: there was recessionas well as growth, periods of high levels of unemployment and blockedsocial mobility. Sometimes people were able to maintain a foot in boththe rural and urban world, or reactivate links into the informal economy,for all that there were renewed questions about what each world offered.


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The nationalist movements we have been examining take hold whenlocal social worlds become more heterogeneous, and older ways ofgaining a livelihood enter into crisis – and with them existing forms oforganisation, knowledge and values. Local forms of sociality areimportant both in themselves and as conceptual frames for ‘nation-building’. However, if we refer to nations as ‘kinship writ large’, or talkof nation-building as ‘the regeneration of community’, we underestimatethe transformations which occur. The movement appropriates some ofthe substance and the exclusionary mechanisms of kinship groups tocreate new groupings amongst populations within a much largerterritory, amongst people who will never be kin or neighbours. It alsocreates solidarity amongst social strata where none had existed before,and ejects long-term neighbours from the moral community. We foundall this most clearly in the discussion of Bosnia – in the nineteenth-century alliance of landlords and peasants in a Muslim politicalmobilisation, in the complex history of ‘Muslim’ as a state narod category,and in the manifold differences between state and local categorisations.We also saw how political polarisation in the 1990s turned long-termneighbours with their overlapping cultural repertoires into accidentallyco-resident representatives of global religious communities.

Political mobilisation has normally come in the first instance fromoutside the rural networks, but it has to capture each locality within theterritory of the nation and speak for the majority, or the ‘true people’,who live there. In the Basque country this came about through thecreation of clubs and political parties linked downwards into localinformal associations, and federated horizontally to dominate thepolitical life of the provinces. Cultural revivals, publishing, festivities,schools, and the activism of clergy all helped to create the linkages andthe dense network of parallel organisations within which the patriotlived. Similar movements were found throughout Europe, includingYugoslavia in an earlier period, but in the 1990s it was the militias andmilitary leaders who precipitated the faultlines of the nation.

Nationalism famously naturalises its own existence, and in the kindsof movement we have been examining this is accompanied by moves todowngrade and destroy forms of solidarity which cut across its borders.This occurs through attacks on the work of rival political movements,through social ostracism and, in extreme cases, through the strategicuse of violence against people and property, forcing local populations totake sides. We have seen the end result of all these processes in thesegregated Basque village, where education, worship, kinship and theeconomy were organised in parallel systems – one for the patriots, theother for the despised immigrants and the unpatriotic supporters of


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alternative political visions. We have seen it even more destructively inBosnia, where ‘ethnic’ polarisation has driven populations into separateterritories and destroyed the contexts in which they once used to meetand work together: the factories, co-operatives and universities.

Nationalist movements create new forms of solidarity and new linesof social division, but what happens in the cultural field as this polarisa-tion takes hold? We have seen the shifting definitions of Basque culture,and the multiple, overlapping cultural repertoires found in Bosnia. Thenationalist identity narrative must produce, instead, a set of representa-tions which portray a people who share a common way of life andhistorical experiences – a culture which is set apart, in its essentials, fromthose of other peoples. One commonly found response is to locate theseessentials in the peasantry – not just because of the political importanceof rural society in the relevant periods, but because they could be seen tocarry more of the important qualities (purity of lifestyle, continuity ofpractice) than townsfolk. But portraying rural peoples as carriers of theauthentic culture of the nation is not without problems. To work, it hasto render invisible both those aspects of culture which Basque or Croatpeasants share with other peasants, and those cultural repertoires whichbelong to peasants but not to bankers or teachers.

This means that certain discursive strategies are necessary indelimiting the culture of the nation. The word ‘strategies’ may evoke aconscious and manipulative process, and in fact there is often experi-mentation in the work of nationalist intellectuals, and quite sharp shiftsin the definition of the nation. However, overall what should be stressedis that certain themes emerge over time as more resonant, and moreeffective, in drawing the boundaries in the right place. ‘Home’ and‘homeland’ unite a wide social spectrum of those who considerthemselves to belong in a place, against ‘others’ who are conceivedprimarily as migrant and rootless; more than this, they make irrelevantthe fact that members of the two groups are actually working alongsideeach other in the same factory. Very often these movements giveprominence to one specific dimension of a nation’s culture which standsfor its identity, and can stand out as a marker of difference. Thesedimensions include the compressed symbols and shrines which evoke arange of meanings and which, through their continued public and privateuse, evoke also the memory of specific experiences; memories ordered andlit by the history of the nation. As a discursive strategy these compressedsymbols are making the part stand for the whole (in rhetoric this is calledsynechdoche). The part is usually less problematic than the whole, andthis is one of the ways unity becomes visible and diversity invisible.


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Movements may have to create unity within populations which havevery few horizontal social linkages (in rural districts); or who speakmutually unintelligible versions of a language (as we saw amongstEuskera-speakers); or who practise significantly different versions of Islam(as we saw in rural and urban Bosnia). In this context I have referred toa discursive strategy based on homology: the articulation from a morallycentral space of an opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in cultural terms,which people could recognise in their various local realities. Crucially,what people share, over and above their differences, is a state ofoppression. This is only the beginning. The work of the movement itselfcreates not just new forms of solidarity – the social networks within whichthe nation exists – but a growing literature and a repertoire of culturalforms within which it is expressed. If the movement culminates in theformation of a new state with its own education system, media, andpower to standardise language, then it has achieved control over thecommanding heights of many cultural domains.

Commentary on definitions of the nation’s culture and their subtletiesshould not obscure the fact that in many circumstances the nation isdefined as a race. Racial discourse is more powerful and dynamic thanthose discourses built around the fate of minority languages or culturaltraits. It leads straight to notions of purity, continuity and the ways theseare threatened; it creates a gendered narrative with historic missions formen and women; it stands for unbridgeable difference between nations,since culture can be acquired but descent lines cannot. Race can standalone, but it also underwrites many of the cultural definitions discussedso far. Roger Just (1989: 76–7), writing of Greece and the concept ofethnos, summarises very well a discursive strategy which is frequentlyfound in the definition of national identity: all the arguments abouthistorical continuity, occupation of territory, language and culture areimportant and fought over, but they constitute evidence of belonging toan ethnic group, whereas the group itself is defined elsewhere – in blood,descent and race. Within this frame, the absence of historical evidencedoes not discredit the national narrative, and the absence of a particularcultural ‘marker’ does not necessarily lead to a person’s exclusion fromthe national body, because that evidence and that membership havebeen established elsewhere. Some of the characteristics of nationalistarguments about identity – the ability to shift ground on cultural issues,the presence of elliptical references and tacit understandings – becomemore comprehensible in this light.

It is not easy to assess how important racial discourses are in theoverall construction of nationality, and how this varies between casesand over time. We could say, somewhat provocatively, that in the late


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nineteenth century nationalists talked so much about race because therhetoric of shared culture was implausible in societies strongly markedby a rural/urban divide; from the mid-twentieth century onwardsnationalists talk so much about culture because in many circumstancesthey are not allowed to talk about race. Substantial differences do existwithin European nationalisms, but it may be better to move from simpletypologies (for example, the dichotomy between civic and ethnicversions) towards a view that there are many strands in nationalistdiscourse, but that they are present in different ways and their relativeweight varies between societies and over time. A society may becommitted officially and legally to a civic and inclusive approach tonationality, but contain within it a strong covert and commonsensicalview of belonging based on descent, in defining who is ‘really’ British orFrench. In certain periods, associated particularly with the politicisationof migration, this breaks through into mainstream political culture,through attempts to change laws on citizenship, and through the workof populist political leaders keen to stress once again the existence ofunbridgeable difference.

Populism and the renewal of nationalism within western Europe arethemes which also emerge in the second part of this chapter. It is madeup of two shorter examples of recent contemporary movements whichcombine a series of economic demands with appeals to the culturalidentity of those who live in a territory or region. They are thus hybrid interms of the normal typologies, but it is my hope that the analytical workof the earlier chapters will make it easier to interpret them.

RED SOUTH

Occitania is a territory defined, in cultural terms, as those lands insouthern France where versions of the langue d’oc are spoken. It wasnever politically unified into a state, but it was a region with autonomouspolitical and cultural forms which came under French domination, mostnotoriously after the crusade against the Cathar heresy in 1209. Thesemassacres were precisely amongst those events which, Renan argued,had to be forgotten if the French nation was to exist. The Occitan activistshave chosen to remember them. Occitania has fuzzy boundaries and nostandardised culture; in practice it is conceptually unified around anopposition to the French language and the French state. The foundationmoment in Occitan identity narratives does not establish the origins ofthe people, but the moment when ‘they’ were subordinated to the French.The cultural, and not least linguistic, diversity of the Occitan region neednot stand in the way of a unitary identity, if this is based on a common


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insubordination to France; on homology, as was suggested above. Thatis, each local population recognises itself in a narrative which opposes‘our’ way of doing and being to that of the dominant French.

In the late nineteenth century there was a literary renaissance of thelangue d’oc, under the leadership of the writer Mistral (who won the NobelPrize in 1904). The first cultural movement, the Felibrige, whichgathered pace in the years following the establishment of compulsoryeduction in French (1885), celebrated the language and cultural valuesof an eternal and mystical Occitan land (see Grillo 1989: Chapter 4). Onehundred years later one strand in the Occitan movement continues tocelebrate local rural traditions through festivities and a range of culturalactivities. Metropolitan intellectuals often castigate these activities (andthe young who settle in these rural areas) as nostalgic, inauthentic, orworse. The strong antipathy to these reinventions is itself curious – itwould seem that only interest in the wrong kind of culture counts asnostalgia. However, these activities do contain some paradoxes. In theworld of MacDonald’s, enthusiasm for the rural and the local, or whatthe French call terroir et tradition, probably does not indicate a desire tolive within the bounds of the local, doomed to eat lentil soup inperpetuity, but to range more widely as a post-modern or translocalgourmet. Touraine also points out that some key symbols of this Occitancivilisation ‘of pastis, rugby and bulls’ (1981: 168) are decidedlymasculine, and that in general rural idylls are less alluring to women.

Although Mistral’s movement had been in favour of federalism, it hadbeen politically divided between right- and left-wing currents, and littleconcerned with economic programmes. Most of the action groups whichemerged after 1968 were mobilised primarily around the economicproblems of Occitania: unemployment, depopulation, an ageingpopulation, low levels of industrialisation. A gulf was opening upbetween this region and the heartlands of the French economy. Tourainebelieved that

France has renounced its social, economic and cultural integration, and hasaccepted … dualisation. The Midi, or south of France, is becoming a‘Mezzogiorno’, a controlled drift towards underdevelopment, occasionallydisguised behind deceptive labels such as the opening up of tourism, the sweetlife, or even defence of the patrimony. (Touraine 1985: 164)

Emigration was for many the only alternative to unemployment at home,and one of the most important political groupings was significantly titledVolem vivre al pais (VVAP): ‘We want to live (and work and decide) in ourown country.’


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Responsibility for this economic crisis was attributed to the Frenchstate, which had variously failed to protect the interests of the region orguarantee the same rights to all its citizens, and presided over aneconomic system which had drained the territory of labour andproductive capital. The French state, when it was active, was seen as aninvading force, riding roughshod over local interests; in fact the mostsustained and violent protest centred on the extension of a military baseat Larzac. The solution to the current ills of the region would involvetransforming the relationship with the highly centralised French state,whether this took the form of a change in planning policy, federalismor autonomy.

On the economic front the most important actors were the wine-growers of Languedoc, and we need to look in a little more detail at theirhistory, because it is amongst this group that a class discourse emergeswithin the general demands of the ‘Occitan people’. The integration ofthe Midi into national and international markets in the nineteenthcentury destroyed much of the textile industry and many forms ofagriculture, but the growing railway network allowed the lowerLanguedoc to develop an intensive vine monoculture between 1855 and1870 (Kielstra 1985: 252). There were some large domains worked withwage-labour, but most vineyards were owned and worked by familyfarmers, while in the first half of the twentieth century a network of co-operative caves developed to handle wine production. There were decadesof prosperity, and then of crisis, resulting from the spread of phylloxeraand later from over-production. Small producers have looked to theFrench state to guarantee their incomes by intervention in the market(distilling surpluses) and by protectionism against outside competition,most recently from within the European Union. Kielstra describes theregion as a ‘relictual space’. Smallholding farmers survived the firstimpact of the market, creating an intensive agriculture and maintainingrelatively large and socially heterogeneous villages (Kielstra 1985: 258),but the region does not have the resources or opportunities for furtherdevelopment. Like certain areas of Italy’s Mezzogiorno, households areforced to generate a livelihood from a variety of sources, and are heavilydependent on transfer funds from the state.

Since the late nineteenth century the labourers and smallholders ofthe Languedoc have generated a radical left political culture. TheSocialist Party was strong but, like Puglia and Andalusia, in the earlytwentieth century this was also a land of revolutionary syndicalism,rejecting representative parliamentary democracy in favour of generalstrikes and tax strikes, mobilising a wide spectrum of the population.Eighty years later the economic demands of the small wine-growers were


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still central to the political agenda, along with a tradition of direct action.Both aspects emerge in Winnie Lem’s (1994; 1999) analysis of the MidiRouge and class politics. Men and women work long hours in thevineyards for a low income, and supplement it with wage-labour, bothbefore and after they inherit the holding. Even when self-employed, theyconsider themselves part of the ‘minimum-wage’ category of the Frencheconomy, and have built ‘a tradition of self-positioning as members ofthe working class’ (Lem 1994: 410). This ascription is oppositional –intrinsic to it is the conflict between those who produce and those whodo not. The term exploitation dominates their political vocabulary: asproducers they exploit the land (exploitation agricole); as a class they arethemselves exploited. As farmers they are rooted, and their language andpractice ‘resonate with the associations of locality, local history and localunderstandings’ (Lem 1994: 403).

Smallholders attribute their low incomes very directly to the failuresof the French state and, while workers go on strike, farmers demonstrateand protest. This tradition of direct action includes the blocking oftransport systems, raiding supermarkets, and daubing state buildingswith graffiti in Occitan. Lem argues that for this section of the population– and in this period, with the French left in power – the referents for classand for (local) culture were interconnected, transforming and reinforcingeach other in political action and in everyday life. ‘Occitania is more thanmerely a cultural construct; it is thoroughly invested with political sig-nificance’ (Lem 1994: 405). For other categories of the population, andat other times, class and local culture diverge.

Touraine and his colleagues have devoted a series of studies to the dif-ficulties faced by political movements which attempt to combine classand ethnicity, as we saw in Wieviorka’s account of Basque nationalism.He believes that the Occitan movement is inevitably fragmented. Onestrand is concerned with affirming the rights of the Occitan people andsaving its culture, although its efforts have been forward-looking, andthe nostalgic elements which dominate other national movements arehere more marginal. The second strand is more concerned with regionaland economic underdevelopment, and seeks solutions through trans-formations within mainstream French politics. The movement is able tocombine the different orientations but not unify them, though ‘theOccitanist movement becomes reinforced each time it draws closer to thebasic communities, at the elementary level where the French Left andOccitanan culture merge in order to oppose the centralising, capitalist,and bureaucratic state’ (Touraine 1985: 161). This is the revolt of the‘pays’ against the neo-liberal state, and the unity of the themes withinlocal experience is confirmed by Lem’s ethnography.


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The word ‘populist’ is used constantly to describe this kind ofmovement, and Touraine devotes long sections of his study to this theme.Populism is a loose concept in political science, and we can return to itafter looking at a second ‘hybrid’ movement, one from Italy whichreveals a similar regional mobilisation against the central state, but witha very different coloration and programme.

WHITE NORTH

The Lega Nord erupted onto the Italian political scene in the early 1990sand won sufficient support in 1994 to form part of a governmentcoalition with other parties of the centre-right (Berlusconi’s Forza Italiaand Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale). Only eight months later the leader,Umberto Bossi, broke the coalition and marched his followers back intoopposition. This was a period of great turmoil in Italian politics. Thecollapse of communism in the east spurred a strategy of renewal withinthe Italian Communist Party which divided its supporters, while the endof the Cold War deprived the Christian Democrat Party of one of itsreasons for existence. The convergence criteria for the formation of asingle (European) currency, established at Maastricht, created pressurefor fiscal reforms which would reduce tax evasion and cut publicexpenditure, while there was also pressure to eliminate forms ofeconomic protectionism. Finally (and these processes are almost certainlyconnected) a series of corruption scandals (‘tangentopoli’) brought downmuch of Italy’s business and political elite and wiped out most of thesmaller parties. A political system based on stable and long-termallegiances evaporated in a few months, and one of the principle winnerswas a maverick party which dared to suggest that the formation of Italy,the sacred Risorgimento, had been a terrible mistake.

In northern Italy from the late 1970s onwards small groups of scholarsestablished associations – leghe – which celebrated local dialects andculture, advocating federalism and opposition to the policies of thecentralised state (for a good early history see De Luna 1994). Bossi wasactive in the Lombard League, mobilising young people in a protestmovement which fought local elections and devoted a good deal ofenergy to establishing the existence of a Lombard people. At one levelthis was a difficult and surprising enterprise: Lombardy did not have thestable political boundaries, linguistic homogeneity or level of regionalpride found in Tuscany, for example. Some progress was made, however.Flags, symbols and claims for a Lombard language emerged, while therally of Lombard Nobles against the Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa inthe twelfth century is now celebrated with much pageantry every year


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at Pontida. However, this more folkloristic emphasis on Lombardethnicity was combined, as we shall see, with arguments about theeconomic and political rights of the region. It became clear that it waspossible to mobilise around a strong sense of localism in the villages andsmall towns without getting into dubious arguments about the commonculture and history of Lombardy. People would revalorise their dialects,both as a means to social inclusion, and in acts of resistance against theItalian state. They could also revalorise community, locality, localknowledge and practice against a state machine which was too remoteto see what it was doing. Localism, and an oppositional stance, were atthis level more potent than claiming one language or culture. Thestructure of the movement – a federation of leagues in a territorialhierarchy – reflects this.

Bossi, who dominated the Lombard League and was elected Senatorin 1987, welded all the leagues from Piedmont to the Veneto into theLega Nord in 1989, and this became a major player in national andregional politics. We can now turn to the social composition of themovement and its political programme.

In a series of influential studies starting in 1977, Bagnasco has arguedthat Italy is internally divided into three territories: an underdevelopedsouth; the ‘Fordist’ industrial triangle of the north-west; and a third Italyin the centre and north-east. This third Italy is a territory of prosperousagriculture and, since the 1960s, of dynamic small-scale industry, whichhas created a series of specialised industrial districts in an urbanisedcountryside. Although the once important division between town andcountry is much eroded by this pattern of industrialisation, there remainsa tradition of localism, of co-operative networks and local savings banks.There is a pattern both of flexible production systems and of socialmobility, between waged employment, self-employment and entrepre-neurship. Although Bagnasco stressed some common economic andsocial characteristics of the ‘Third Italy’, there were importantdifferences. Rural Lombardy and the Veneto had been dominated bypeasant smallholding and a ‘white’ Catholic political culture, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany by the share-cropping system and ‘red’communism. The Lega Nord took root predominantly in the white areas,without a history of class mobilisation, after the collapse of the ChristianDemocrat Party.

Electoral support for the Lega Nord waxed and waned in the 1990s.During its high points support came from across northern Italy,including the big cities like Milan, and also from a very wide socialspectrum. During the low points the Lega’s electoral base was concen-trated in the mountain villages, small towns and urbanised countryside


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of the Veneto and Lombard provinces, becoming ‘the party of thenorthern industrial periphery’ (Bagnasco and Oberti 1998: 161). Theactivists of the Lega Nord, as in Occitania, are predominantly young menwho use sexualised political slogans, and engage in street-level contes-tation, painting graffiti, changing road signs, heckling opponents.Whether wage-labourers or tied into family businesses, in this small-town environment they tend to know each other as friends orschoolmates and socialise together in the bars, pizza parlours, pin-ballarcades and sports centres of this hinterland. Much of the normalapparatus of internal party democracy – committees and elected officers– may be missing or ignored, but analysts have noted the dense networkof meeting places and activity which characterise the Lega as amovement, and its habits of direct participation and unmediated,populist political language.

The Lega is notoriously volatile in its proposals. Political scientists tryto make sense of these changes by talking of phases in the movement,but the evidence is not always convincing. For example, the stress onethnicity and the racist attacks on migrants are said to belong to an early,immature stage of the movement, before it embraced a more realisticprogramme. Unfortunately the Lega continues to legitimate racistpractice both in the speeches of its parliamentary deputies and in itsgrass-roots activity. Rather than an analysis of phases, I would arguethat the Lega has cumulatively adopted and developed a series of‘common-sense’ understandings about locality, migration, politicians,taxes and the state, and fused them into one self-confirming and self-reinforcing discourse. It has particular resonance in small centres witha tradition of civic pride, entrepreneurship and a strong work ethic,which have been through very rapid post-war industrialisation but nowface growing economic insecurity.

The problems these regions faced in the 1990s came from twodirections. One derived from changes in the organisation of productionand distribution. Benetton no longer produces many of its garments inthe Veneto; supermarkets came late to Italy, but again they do not buylocally, and are decimating the small retailers. Capitalism does not arrivein one hit, but impacts on different sectors in different periods, andalthough there will be winners as well as losers in the widening ofmarkets and horizons, change is very fast and requires collectiveresources to handle it successfully. The second problem for the smallproducers and the self-employed comes from fiscal policy. In the Italianprivate sector, tax evasion is a national sport, but became more difficultin the early 1990s, after Maastricht. Computerised cash registers,controls on VAT invoices, income tax calculated on estimates of likely


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earnings rather than self-declaration, and a variety of other measuresall had their effect. Stricter controls on the hiring of labour – employers’contributions double the wage bill and were widely avoided – squeezedprofits in small businesses. The new tax regime was labyrinthine, time-consuming, sometimes punitive, and very unpopular.

If tax revenues are wasted they become even more unpopular. Asecond common-sense theme the Lega articulates is that the Italian stateis inefficient and corrupt, financing an over-inflated, unproductive publicsector which delivers very poor services. The revolt against bureaucracyis combined with a very specific attack on the way the hard-workingproductive north subsidises a parasitic south. The centre of this perversemechanism is Rome, which becomes a complex symbol of all that iswrong in contemporary Italy. Rome is the centre of the existing politicalsystem, in which the parties are alienated from the people – a systemwhich took control of the resources of the state to buy votes throughclientelism in the south, and was exposed as universally corrupt by thescandals and trials of 1991–94. It is all a mafia. Rome is also the sink intowhich northern wealth is drained. In general there is little sympathy forusing state revenues to redistribute wealth, and this is combined with avehement attack on the moral qualities of southerners (terroni) andsouthern society. The attack is widened to all migrants, who areportrayed as parasitic – recipients of welfare, beneficiaries of citizenshiprights which local people are losing, alien people who should live at homeamongst their own kind.

The Lega works to construct a political, cultural and moral gulf betweenthe north and the south of Italy, and in that sense to undo the Risorgi-mento and the commemorative pieties of state rhetoric. Part of that workinvolves patrolling boundaries, beating the bounds (organising a flotillaof boats down the Po river), boycotting institutions like state television,and also controlling the territory against the enemy within – mostrecently Albanian migrants who are accused of destroying the fabric ofsociety. There is also a conceptual repositioning in Lega discourse: ‘Thefurther we are from Rome, the closer to Europe’ runs another slogan,while La Padania newspaper is subtitled Nord Mitteleuropeo. If Italy wasformed by an ill-considered yoking together of societies with very differentcultures and values, the strengthening of the European Union (althoughoften contested), and the erosion of nation-state sovereignty allow someof the damage to be undone. The European Union itself has generated apowerful (rather nineteenth-century) discourse of modernity to describeits own dynamic, and this provides a pervasive framework for describingsocial and cultural difference both within the Union and at its boundaries:difference is conceptualised within a hierarchy of modernity and back-


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wardness. Thus northern Italy (like Slovenia in the previous chapter) isa society of hard-working, prosperous and progressive people who candraw ‘closer to Europe’ by freeing themselves from the shackles of abackward, parasitic Mediterranean south.

The Lega has two political options: separatism and federalism. Withthe first the Lega becomes a nationalist movement, stressing ethnicdifference, and launching a campaign of civil disobedience and the kindof political theatre (issuing green uniforms and Lombard currency) whichindicate a demand for independence. With the second the Lega allies itselfwith other political parties in the Italian mainstream to seek constitu-tional changes which would lead to greater autonomy, and plays downsome of the ethnic themes. The second strategy requires a stable coalitionwith both Alleanza Nazionale (whose commitment to a strong state andits southern electorate cannot be finessed indefinitely), and Forza Italia,which competes directly with the Lega on a neo-liberal programme.

The Lega’s claims are often ridiculed in the rest of Italian society. Itsleader, Bossi, has championed an unsophisticated (rozzo) political style,and the party is written off by political commentators with every slumpin electoral support. It bounced back in the regional elections of 2000,declined in the national elections of 2001, but did enough to claimimportant ministerial positions in Berlusconi’s second government.(Political science writings on the Lega include Piccone 1991; Ruzza andSchmidtke 1991 and 1993; Visentini 1993.) One aspect of the Legawhich is difficult to assess is the switching between the politics of inde-pendence and that of reform: is that indecision, inconsistency, or thegradual emergence of a more realistic political programme? It may benone of these things. It can be argued that, as in the Occitan case, themovement combines two themes, one seeking to take control of theregion by reaffirming the social values and networks of local society, theother championing a neo-liberal programme of tax cutting and marketfreedoms within Italian society. The balance between the two is unstable.If the Lega moves too much into the mainstream it loses touch with itsyoung anti-state activists; if it gives too much space to folkloric localismand separatism it loses ground to Berlusconi’s version of neo-liberalism,which is already more representative of the major business interests inthe north. So support fluctuates wildly, but in its heartlands these twothemes can be combined, and even reinforce each other in the Lega’sdiscourse: northern people are industrious and independent, they payexcessive levels of tax to subsidise those who will not work; this regimeof a ‘nanny-state’ (assistenzialismo), whose benefits flow to the south andto migrants, is the creation of a corrupt political elite, who are allied to acorrupt business and financial elite; the state is external and disruptive,


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it is counterposed to a bounded local society, of those who know eachother, know their own business and their territory, but who perceive, ina period of rapid change, that they no longer control their own destinies.The unrooted, disorderly and invasive migrant also becomes a focus forthe construction and regeneration of territorial identities (for example,through the formation of local action committees), in a pattern which isbecoming familiar throughout Italy.

POPULISM

The Lega has been described as populist, or neo-populist. There is someambivalence amongst political scientists about the usefulness of a termwhich has been used to describe phenomena as diverse as the agrarianparties of eastern Europe or North America in the early twentiethcentury, as well as the regional movements and xenophobic parties ofcontemporary Europe (Taggart 1995). ‘Populism’ evokes a broad-basedand radical movement of ‘the people’, radical in the sense of mobilised inopposition to existing power structures. Who are ‘the people’ inpopulism? If liberalism addresses the citizens, and socialism addresses theworkers, populism represents hard-working, independent producers –‘the little men’ running farms and family businesses who form thehealthy bedrock of society. They are struggling against big business andfinance (often portrayed as an alien and conspiratorial community), oragainst the state, which neglects their interests, taxes them without anyreturn, and fetters them in regulations. We can think of populism as atype of politics, but also as a political discourse which can be combinedwith a number of political projects, and it is this range of combinationswith makes populism so pervasive and ill-defined. It can combine withnationalism, and with versions of socialism, as we saw in the Occitanmovement. It can also combine with neo-liberalism, as in BritishThatcherism or on the Italian right, where policies designed to get ‘thestate’ off our backs or rid society of welfare scroungers are conjoined withnotions of organic communities, and a strand of anti-modernism.

Populism is said to emerge when groups are alienated from existingmainstream parties, and have come to distrust representational politics,since their representatives end up getting co-opted into the establishmentand betraying their roots. There is a move towards more participatoryforms of democracy, for leaders who maintain an unpretentious lifestyle,use vernacular speech and maintain ‘unmediated’ contact with theirpeople. Bossi, for example, is a tireless speaker at small-town meetingsand larger rallies. The moral dimension of populist discourse is polarisedaround an opposition between the honest, hard-working people, with a


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rooted and authentic culture, against the corrupt, sophisticated, cos-mopolitan elites, a theme which has sometimes been articulated aroundan opposition between the country and the city, and sometimes aroundanti-semitism. An enthusiasm for economic liberties may be combinedwith social intolerance and political authoritarianism.

Two other aspects of these movements are particularly interesting inrelation to the major themes of this study. If class movements havestressed identities constructed through work, and nationalism hadstressed the shared homeland, these movements combine them. Both theLanguedoc wine growers and the Lega activists point to their hard workand their role as producers as features which set them apart from others,but they also demonstrate a strong attachment to a land and its culture.Their demands are best summarised as they wish to be masters in their ownhouse, and the movements have indeed produced songs to that effect(Baier 1991: 83). Moreover, as Narotzky (1997: 198) notes, ‘Theconcept of “casa” is one that pervades the political construction of aCatalan national identity’, though she goes on to disentangle thecomplex relations compressed into that homely symbol. The combination(found also in the populist peasant parties of eastern Europe) becomescomprehensible when we remember that the movements have at theircentre, sometimes more in their imagery than in reality, people whoseeconomic activity is based around the household, involving continuityover generations and within a territory.

The second point is that although these movements uphold the rightsof self-reliant small producers, they emerge in a period of changingeconomic horizons and growing uncertainty. Two authors haveaddressed this issue. Touraine has argued that populism emerges as adesire for continuity in a period of change – sometimes defending acollective experience which is threatened, sometimes trying to controlthe process, but always failing to come to terms with historical ruptures(Touraine 1981: 172). This makes the identity narratives quite complex.They are similar to some of those found in unambiguously nationalistmovements, with their foundation myths in the battles of the twelfth orthirteenth century, and a minority of supporters drawn to the resurrec-tion of organic rural communities. But the majority of supporters in theOccitan and north Italian movements do not believe that the good societylies in the past and, in general, populism per se pays less attention tohistory than nationalism does – either to establish identity or as a basisfor its claims. These movements are more oriented to the present, or atbest to an ameliorative (rather than transformative) future, attemptingto achieve growth, progress and security within the parameters ofexisting economic forms.


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Populism is also a theme in Integral Europe (Holmes 2000). The mostfascinating and challenging parts of this study analyse the way in whicha whole stream of contemporary movements draws on what (followingIsaiah Berlin) Holmes calls a ‘counter-enlightenment’ European intel-lectual tradition. He documents the way in which leaders such as Le Penin France attack the notion that progress is the secret of happiness,advocating instead the pursuit of order and harmony (2000: 36), castinghimself as a cultural healer and claiming authenticity through an appealto experience and instinct, not reason. While the analysis of this politicaltradition is brilliant, Holmes says rather less about the movementsthemselves and their social base. However, he does trace the rise ofintegralism and populism to a number of general processes, in a waywhich parallels the comments of Touraine. He refers to two in particular.‘Fast-capitalism’ involves rapid technological change which, combinedwith privatisation and deregulation, reshapes the landscape of wealthand deprivation with astonishing speed. At the same time it impover-ishes many of the existing frameworks of social solidarity, and even thenotion of society itself. Secondly, the European Union’s drive to economicintegration has led to the inadvertent creation of cultural pluralismwhich, together with the dynamics of capitalism, has underminedsovereignty at the level of the nation-state.

There is a growing range of movements arguing for the rights ofspecific peoples in all parts of Europe. Some articulate ethno-nationalism,combined with very strong opposition to mass transnational migration,like those in Austria, Belgium or Switzerland. For these xenophobicmovements there is evidence of increasing pan-European co-ordinationand, as Holmes (2000: 199) suggests, the path has been cleared for theirentry into the mainstream of European politics. They exist alongsidemovements articulating claims for greater regional autonomy aroundmore inclusive or civic forms of nationalism. Overall, these movementsvary in terms of their social composition, identities and political actions,but they also display a series of overlapping themes and family resem-blances. We can analyse similarities and differences to produce variouspolitical categories, but some of the analytical problems arise fromprecisely the combination of similarities and differences. One example isthe emergence of arguments about the rights of those who belong in alocality. VVAP (‘We want to live and work and decide in our own pays’)defended those who wanted to remain in places which have becomeimpoverished and marginalised. As a movement it embraced some of theambitions of rural anarchism, but discourses about belonging are foundacross the political spectrum, ending with Le Pen’s ‘France for theFrench’ and equivalent slogans in the Lega Nord. We can find movements


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for local and regional autonomy which start with open and democraticpurposes, but develop a harder edge and a more exclusionary view aboutwho belongs in the region. In the concluding comments I will take upsome of the problems in categorising these recent developments.

The Lega Nord represents the wealthiest region of Italy, and one of themost prosperous in Europe – its average per capita income is close to thatof Germany. Generally it embraces economic liberalism and socialclosure: it does not wish any of that wealth to be redistributed by the state,either to Italy’s poorer ‘peoples’ or in welfare provisions for migrants. Ifredistribution policies within Italy are unacceptable, we can expect littlesupport for redistribution at a European level. There is little interest inthe historical connection between northern wealth and southernpoverty, and the mechanisms through which they were generated in theperiod since the Risorgimento: instead they are attributed to accidents ofgeography and mentality. Occitania is one of the poorer regions of France– more so in the heyday of the movement 25 years ago than now. Manyof the activists in the movement are also small family producers, but withvery low incomes and locked into a declining sector of production. Theymobilise against the French state, but in favour of greater intervention.In northern Italy the Lega’s policies merge with those of the majorindustrial and financial companies: de-regulation, privatisation, cuttinglabour costs and welfare programmes. In Occitania there was moreconvergence with the policies of the traditional left, in favour of redistri-bution and state investment, though we have to note that demands forprotectionism (against cheap wine imports) come at the expense of evenmore disadvantaged parts of the world.

Localism and regionalism may be re-valued in periods when hopes forstable employment are frustrated, and inherited businesses and farmsbecome valueless. To ‘live, work and decide in one’s own country’ is afine ambition, even if best stripped of illusions that the pays will be a staticor harmonious community. Whereas Touraine has denounced thepopulism of these movements, on the basis of a rather purist conceptionof what constitutes class politics, Lem has insisted that Occitanregionalism (with others) has incorporated a strong class identity (Lem1999: Chapter 8). Narotzky (1997: 220) has also suggested thatterritorial entities with a ‘counter-hegemonic local culture’ could be thebasis for new class projects, through which people attempt to ‘own theirfutures’ (1997: 218). Her comments emerge from analysis of a districtin Catalonia which contains farming households with multiple incomes,as well as textile production organised through sub-contracting, outworkand co-operatives. This is not a wage-labour economy, but people dohave a practical consciousness of the multiple and interconnected ways


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in which their lives are shaped by capitalist relations. If class mobilisationbased on wage-labour and national unions and parties has declined,perhaps a new movement can be built out of groups of people who aresubject to capital in more heterogeneous ways, but share strongterritorial links and an anti-state counter-culture.

Here I return to the combination of similarities and differences in thesecases. Movements which articulate strong local identities, definingthemselves in opposition to a centralising nation-state and whichmobilise the ‘small business’ sector and households which often havemultiple sources of livelihood, can nevertheless be committed to verydifferent political objectives. We need more detailed research and analysisto illuminate why that should be. The ‘small business’ sector is anincreasingly complex reality: while entrepreneurs and the self-employedmay value independence in the workplace, they usually have very littlecontrol over the larger field of production and the markets in which theyoperate, the clothing giants for which they are subcontractors, or thewine wholesalers they supply. Small businesses are integrated into thislarger economy in different ways, and they can interpret that integrationin different ways. Increased market integration can be seen as thecreation of a competitive and open environment, an opportunity forgrowth, or as working to the perpetual disadvantage of local people,undermining the autonomy they possessed when markets were lessdeveloped. Much will depend on the sector of the economy these smallbusinesses occupy, but these interpretations will also be shaped by pre-existing Catholic or socialist political cultures, with their discourses ofidentity, solidarity and social justice.

Talk of regions is pervasive in contemporary European politicaldiscourse, and within the European Commission they are seen as a wayof developing a legitimate level of government below the nation-state (LeGalès and Lequesne 1998: vii). Regions have the same warm glow andconceptual fuzziness as did ‘communities’ in the 1980s. The regionswhich appear on maps of Europe and in the minds of political activistsrarely correspond to significant economic units, though this is not todeny that certain regions are taking political and institutional shape, andare buttressed by arguments about cultural diversity. The politicalquestion is what happens to ‘populism’ as Catalonia or northern Italygain greater political autonomy (control over tax revenues, and overeducational and social policy) and some of the anti-state arguments losetheir force. Does populism wither away, to be replaced by a spectrum ofparties, or is it consolidated along with a regional identity and mobilisa-tion around xenophobia?


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The related economic question is the extent to which we canunderstand the economic processes and diversity of contemporaryEurope using a purely territorial model. Certainly there are rich and poorregions, and some of the differences are spectacular, but there are alsostriking differences between high-technology centres and abandonedmountain villages in southern France or northern Italy. As Narotzkyremarks, the centralisation of ownership and power can be combinedwith the decentralisation of production, so that the old territorial modelsof centre and periphery – which fired up, for example, Occitanian activists– become less accurate. If local and regional identities become thedominant frame for political mobilisation, how do you develop a politicswhich will address those centres of power and control? Those on the rightwho think that the plight of small shopkeepers and businesses will beresolved by unfettered neo-liberalism will presumably get what theydeserve. Those on the left who see a new terrain for mobilisation,combining the local and the global, have a much harder task.


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9 CONCLUSION

This book has documented the mobilisation of groups to achieve a radicalre-ordering of society by methods involving direct, often violent, con-frontation with the existing state. Generally they were also radical intheir effect on social relations, creating polarised identities which deniedsocial gradations or the existence of overlapping and cross-cutting formsof cultural practice. There is also a series of contrasts, at least at a firstlevel of generalisation. In relation to social space, class movementsenacted a struggle which was pervasive throughout a given society;nationalist movements struggled for territorial separation and the defeatof the enemy within. In relation to time, class movements were future-oriented in their attempt to establish a new kind of society, and ways ofbeing which had never existed before. Nationalist movements, builtaround identities established through historical continuity, offered thereconstitution of ways of being which had been lost. In this conclusion Ishall amplify and qualify these generalisations, looking in turn at theissue of identity, political strategies and the social transformations withinwhich these movements emerged. It will be a selective and open-endedconclusion, concentrating on a few issues which might stimulatereflections and comparisons from others.

POLITICS AND IDENTITY

I have stressed that class movements articulate identities, but this doesnot mean that I wish to assimilate class to the category of ‘identitypolitics’, as currently construed. This would be an unhelpful move on anumber of accounts. Class, whether understood as a socio-economiccategory or as a political subject, does not fit the model of ‘rights-based’politics, of groups struggling for recognition, or celebrating theirdifference. Coole (1996: 24) has argued that the ‘hegemonic status ofthe discourses of difference among those who lay claim to politicalradicalism’ has led to a silence about class. In fact, as Grossberg suggests(1996: 90), even the upsurge of studies dealing with multiple identities,

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which claim to give parity of treatment to ‘race, class and gender’, veryrarely fit class into the frame. It tends to disappear after a tokenappearance on the first page (see also Ortner 1998: 1). A second issue isthe way in which the study of ‘identity politics’, within cultural studies,has been dominated by a concern with the construction of identity, basedon the study of texts, and drawing theoretical insight from workanalysing psychological rather than sociological processes. Thetheoretical work is sophisticated and challenging, exploring, for example,the way in which identity is established through the experience of lossand rupture – a theme which starts with Freud and is picked up bywriters from Hall to Passerini. However, models derived from individualexperience provide only a limited blueprint for the analysis of politicalmovements, and although intellectuals have stretched notions of‘reading’ and ‘writing’ to cover more and more aspects of life, there arelimits to the model of ‘texts’ in trying to understand the dynamics of socialexclusion, mobilisation and action.

There are conflicting strands within this field of study. Muchtheoretical work has gone into deconstructing essentialist notions ofidentity based on sameness, replacing them with a conception of identityas multiple, plural, or hybrid, based on difference, and emerging througha complex process which may include internalisation of the ‘other’ andexternalisation of the self. The shift from essentialist to non-essentialistconceptions of identity is sometimes presented as a long evolution intheory, working its way through in psychology, philosophy, linguistics.At other points the shift is presented as a ‘real-world’ global and epochalmove from the homogenising collective action and institutional politicscharacteristic of modernity towards post-industrial, post-colonial or post-modern social forms. If we then ask whether it is true that people havemore identities, or more complex identities, than they did a hundredyears ago, we raise the suspicion that the term identity itself is not stablein this analysis. It moves, in often unacknowledged ways, between ageneral usage emerging out of social organisation and practice (such asthose of gender, locality, occupation or religion) and that of the ‘masternarratives’ of class or nation.

The most open and stimulating of these accounts recognise that it maynot be very convincing to tell the history of the twentieth century interms of a move from all-encompassing totalities to fragmentation andcomplexity. Raymond Williams (1985) suggested that every generationbelieved the organic, integrated community was found more completelyin the past. Hall (sometimes) follows him in warning us to be carefulabout assumptions that once upon a time the great collective socialidentities, like the working class, were homogenous and fully formed


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(Hall 1991: 46). The evidence from places like Sesto San Giovanniindicates that working-class movements were heterogeneous and awareof it, making rather than made, their unity depending on a forwardmomentum. At the same time the contemporary world is still full ofpolitics based on essentialism – whether the institutional practices ofnation-states, those found in many rights-based identity politics, or inthe more conservative social movements which current theory tends tomarginalise. It is also important to note that the politics which expressesnon-essentialised conceptions of identity, either of multiple selves orhybridity, is of a different kind from the movements explored in this book.Hall (1991: 57) suggests that this second kind of identity politics developsprimarily in the cultural field, challenging and discomforting dominantrepresentations through the exploration of multiple difference. He alsosuggests that the move from an essentialised to a non-essentialisedpolitics of identity is associated with a shift from what Gramsci called the‘politics of movement’ – of mass, co-ordinated activity – to ‘the politicsof position’, of more protracted and dispersed struggles. The shift isportrayed as historical and irreversible (Hall 1996: 427), deriving fromfundamental political and cultural transformations, including thegrowth of civil society.

These arguments about identity politics take us straight into historicaland geographical generalisations about the differences betweentraditional and modern societies, or between eastern and western Europe.I want to put these on one side for the moment, and suggest that essen-tialist and non-essentialist discourses co-exist within contemporarycultures. I will concentrate instead on the issue of identity in the morerestricted field of political movements. It seems to me that a strongelement of essentialism, however theoretically unfashionable, is anecessary part of these movements. Grossberg (1996: 89) summarisesessentialised identities as those ‘defined by either a common origin, or acommon structure of experience or both. Basically the struggle over rep-resentations of identity here takes the form of offering one fullyconstituted, separate and distinct identity in place of another.’ This kindof politics does not obliterate other kinds of identity, but it doessubordinate them, generating a view that a person’s most important oressential experience is derived from membership of a class or a nation,and conversely that these provide the core framework for interpretinghistory. This identity is articulated through a narrative which establisheswho ‘we’ are through two axes, one of which is biographical anddiachronic, while the other is oppositional and synchronic. These worktogether, though in different movements and in different contexts onemay predominate over the other. This schema is an alternative to the

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rigid essentialist/non-essentialist distinction, and seems moreappropriate for the study of political movements. I will say a little moreabout it at a formal level before returning to substantive issues.

OF BATTLES AND BEGETTING

Narratives are stories told. They range from the more formal, authorita-tive written histories of a people, of a movement, or of an epic leader,through to the emblematic event, evoked in more ephemeral writing orat gatherings, fragments of ‘folk-history’ (historiae), or lessons whichencapsulate a defining moment. The narratives unfold in time, and therelationship between past, present and future creates a particular‘semantics of time’. Therborn (1995: 4) has written, ‘Modernity … can bedefined as an epoch turned to the future, conceived as likely to be differentfrom and possibly better than the present and the past. The contrastbetween the past and the future directs modernity’s “semantics of time”.’It is precisely in this sense that Le Pen and the other leaders discussed byHolmes (see Chapter 8) are ‘anti-modernity’ in their political visions,distancing them from this conception of progress. The point can beextended. Some movements, especially nationalist ones, have narrativeswhich stress a foundation moment, and move through a succession ofevents which establish identity through continuity: a people remains‘true to itself’ if it stays close to its origins and foundation; authenticity isassociated with the past. Others, especially class movements, are orientedtowards a future which is either a continuation of current processes or atransformative revolution – possibly a messianic end of history, so thatthe present is incorporated into that future, and a movement remains‘true to itself’ if it stays on a road going forward.

These aspects of an identity discourse are directed ‘inwards’; they areabout unity and solidarity; when working smoothly, the historicalnarrative is redolent of the chapters of ‘begetting’ found in Genesis. Theyare also combined with the symbolic and ritual elements celebrated whenpeople are ‘amongst their own’ and which we associate with unity inmany contexts. But this is also a contested terrain, where people competefor leadership and make accusations that a movement has been betrayed– accusations which are again generated out of the ‘semantics of time’characteristic of each movement: either that it has lost its roots and itslinks to the past, or lost its direction and its links to the future. These, then,are part of the ‘internal politics’ of a movement, fought out in terms of whobest represents and can speak for authentic Basque culture or the interestsof the working class in a movement prone to schism. This is how the bookstarted, with the struggle over possession of the red flag of Lassalle.


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But, as already indicated, this is only half the story: identity is alsoestablished through difference. This perception, at an abstract orconceptual level, was developed in theoretical work on the arbitrarynature of the linguistic sign, but in the study of identity the notion of‘difference’ has to be widened to include a political as well as a conceptuallevel. This feature is most important in class movements, since theirwhole purpose is not to defend some free-standing essence, but tomobilise in opposition to a system of domination and to create a classlesssociety. Class is conceived as a relationship, and the discourse includes anaccount of how society itself came to be divided. At a more practical levelwe have seen how broad-based class movements, like the ItalianCommunist Party, have appealed to the interests of all those who sharedan opposition to monopoly capital.

In the case of national identity, we will often find that their historiescontain a mixture of elements stressing opposition and continuity, battlesand begetting. This dual character is revealed in the parts of nationalhistories which deal with foundation – the moment in time when theybecame who they are. Foundation often involves a ‘myth of disjunction’(Denich 1993) such as the religious conversion of an existing people (aswith the Irish), or the migration of a people to occupy their present land(as in much of eastern Europe), though the Basques claimed to beautochtonous, and merged their history with biblical myths. But there isusually a second foundation moment, which focuses attention on therelations of dominance or subordination which mark a nation’s history:the loss of autonomy to Castilian Spain, the defeat of the Serbs by theTurks in Kosovo. This is the ‘external politics’ of a fight against theSpanish state to achieve autonomy, or to reposition the Serbian peoplewithin a Yugoslav federation. In the case of some contemporary racistmovements there may, for various strategic reasons, be considerablesilence about what ‘we’ share, and self-definition is generated to a largeextent out of opposition: who we are against.

Other aspects of this process can only be understood by moving awayfrom identity-as-narrative, and putting these mobilising discourses backinto a social context. We have seen that these movements operate atdifferent levels, widening upwards from the face-to-face local interactionin a Bosnian village or an Italian factory. Articulating the connectionsmeans building ‘imagined communities’ out of real communities, or atleast out of the immediacy of everyday experience. This has ofteninvolved the use of homology – that is, through stressing that whatpeople share is a common structural position, of difference or subordi-nation. I first used the term homology to discuss an aspect of Basquenationalism. There is of course a century-old political tradition of defining

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the Basque people in terms of essences – shared blood, language orculture. But an increasingly prominent second strand was to define thenation as all those within the territory who found themselves inopposition to the Spanish. Here and elsewhere, an authoritativediscourse can establish identity between people who never meet bycreating a powerful interpretation of the relations of difference andopposition which structure their everyday lives.

So identity is not only a narrative, it is part of social practice. In Chapter5, summarising class movements, we saw the different ways people werebrought together in grass-roots organisations, and the way the lines ofclass division were polarised by political actions such as the generalstrike. The two chapters dealing with nationalism and identity drew onwork which moved away from mapping ‘bits of culture’ onto boundedgroups, and looked at the dynamics of ethnicity in relation to socialpractice. The people of Bilbao, Sarajevo and their rural hinterlands areengaged in many relations, including those established through kinship,neighbourhood, work, education and religion. Sociologically these rela-tionships may overlap, to create more totalising and bounded worlds, orthey may cut across each other, so that the natal village, the residentialneighbourhood and the workplace are worlds apart. The social worldsmay merge or separate, and these patterns are restructured over time asthe larger processes work their way through: migration, social mobility,growth and recession, and the effects of various state policies.

These sociological processes obviously affect identity and mobilisation,but I do not want to suggest that this happens in a linear or mechanicalway. In times of rapid change and dislocation one set of relations mayrepresent security and continuity, the home or homeland, which makespeople what they are, through and through, in whatever context theyfind themselves. Once again, though, in order to understand how aspectsof culture and performance become integrated into an ethnic identity,we need to look at the interplay between cultural differences and socialboundaries. This includes the process I have referred to by the ungainlyphrase ‘the ethnicisation of social relations’, and in the case studies itbegan with the analysis of particular social forms – the neighbourhoodgroups and voluntary associations of Basque society, the nacije of Bosnia.These groupings, generated through processes of inclusion andexclusion, and with their own moral vocabulary of trust, reciprocity andbetrayal, were essential to the building of a wider political movement.Both regions have been socially polarised through violence. I havefollowed other commentators in suggesting that violence should not beseen as an innate consequence of ethnic difference, but as a political


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strategy which consolidates internal leadership and hardens ethnicboundaries by obliterating social interaction across them.

MODERNITY, OR WHAT TIME IS IT?

One of the recurring themes in the political movements we haveexamined is the fate of rural society, whether that involved labourers,share-croppers or small farmers. We have also found visions ofautonomous and egalitarian rural communities embedded in politicalmovements as diverse as Basque nationalism, Andalusian anarchismand east European populism. The prominence of rural themes derivespartly from the priorities of the first generation of anthropologists, but itis also a reflection of the numerical importance of this population andthe political importance of their mobilisation and dispersal. Hobsbawm(1994) has suggested that the most important long-term feature of thetwentieth century is that, for the first time in human history, urbandwellers began to outnumber those who gained their livelihood fromproducing food. It is easy to forget how recent this is: even in Europe, oneof the most industrialised corners of the globe, it only happened towardsthe middle of the century. Table 9.1 gives some census figures whichshow that in 1950 agriculture employed a quarter of the population inFrance and Germany, between 40 and 50 per cent in southern Europe,and between 50 and 75 per cent in eastern Europe. If we take intoaccount the migration process and the generational lag, then even forsome time after 1950 the majority of adults in Europe had directexperience of a rural world.

One recent contribution to the study of nationalism has very explicitlydrawn attention to the importance of this rural world and its recentcollapse. Tom Nairn’s argument in The Curse of Rurality (1997) for themost part converges with that of Gellner, in the connections betweenmodernisation, industrial society and nationalism. However, he suggeststhat the majority of ethno-nationalist conflicts seem to occur in pre-dominantly rural situations (Nairn 1997: 90) and, as a result, he givesa significantly different emphasis to the historical transition. While mostaccounts had stressed the emergence of a new social order – the culturalforms and rationality of industrial society – Nairn places centre stage theexperience of those who went through the transition, and particularlyof two groups. One is made up of a certain kind of urban intellectuals(such as those of the Basque provinces), ‘who seek to mobilise lost-worldpsychology in order to build a new world, that of the modern nation-state’ ( Nairn 1997: 91). The other is the rural migrants themselves, wholook backwards as much as forwards. In the disruption and dislocation

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of the industrial transition, both are haunted by the presence or thememory of a rooted, stable, rural world.

Table 9.1 The demise of rural Europe

Percentage of working population in agriculture 1910–80

1910 1930 1950 1960 1980

North-Western EuropeUK 9 6 5 4 3France 41 36 27 22 8Germany 37 29FRG 23 14 4GDR 27 18 10Southern EuropeItaly 55 47 42 31 11Spain 56 50 42 14Portugal 57 49 44 28Greece 50 54 51 56 37Eastern EuropePoland 77 66 54 48 31Czechoslovakia 40 37 39 26 11Hungary 58 53 51 37 20Yugoslavia 82 78 71 63 29Romania 80 77 74 67 29Bulgaria 82 80 65 56 37

Source: G. Ambrosius and W. Hubbard, A Social and Economic History ofTwentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass., 1989: 58–9.

This cultural strand is so strong that Nairn suggests ‘ethnicnationalism is in essence a peasantry transmuted, at least in ideal terms,into a nation’. Even in France, the home of enlightened civic nationalism,there was always another powerful strand in the construction of Frenchnationality, one epitomised in the figure of Nicolas Chauvin, theploughman-soldier (Nairn 1997: 103), who would emerge from his ruraldarkness to fight for his country and articulate the connections betweenblood, soil and xenophobia. Nairn argues that this rural world is a ‘curse’,in the sense that its haunting presence is one of the factors which givesvirulence to ethno-nationalist conflict. He develops this analysisprimarily with reference to Cambodia; in fact the article is built aroundan extensive review of Kiernan’s book (1996) on the Pol Pot regime,arguing that Cold War dogmatics had obscured the fact in its murderousattempt to construct an ethnically pure rural society: ‘The Cambodian


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Hell was more truly an aberration of nationalist development than ofsocialism’ (Nairn 1997: 92). Nairn suggests other parallel processes inRwanda and Yugoslavia, and in less dramatic but equally murderouscontexts like Northern Ireland and the Basque country.

Nairn’s perspective is summarised in a striking phrase, ‘Modernisa-tion involves passage through something like a colossal mill-race, inwhich a multigenerational struggle between the rural past and theurban–industrial future is fought out … where one global mode ofexistence perishes to make way for a successor’ (Nairn 1997: 104).When did all this happen? It is still going on; the curse, the turmoil, arestill with us. Even in industrial heartlands the rural past is much morerecent than people realise. ‘The kind of remaking which features inmodern nationalism is not creation ex nihilo, but a reformulationconstrained by determinate parameters of that past’ (Nairn 1997: 104).The ‘intense emotionality and violence’ (Nairn 1997: 106) ofnationalism is derived from those rural roots. Gellner gave too muchemphasis to modernity and the new; his argument foreclosed tooabruptly on the past. We may be living in a much earlier period of themodernisation process than intellectuals realise.

The thunder of the long collapse [of an ancient rural world] is still by far theloudest sound in all our ears. From Frank McLuhan to Baudrillard, theorists havesought to discern electronic post-modernity through the clouds of dust … Manyintellectuals go on believing it is much later than most people and politiciansthink. (Nairn 1997: 122)

In this article, and in earlier work (Nairn 1981) which introduced thesymbol of Janus into our understanding of nationalism, Nairn looks atthe reaction of populations living through rapid change – change whichis, or is perceived to be, destructive of social forms which are rooted, par-ticularistic, organic. We first met a version of this, paradoxically, in thecontext of class movements, in the loss and alienation of artisansrecruited into a factory system, and in the collective memory ofanarchists, and the way in which they could be harnessed to a vision ofthe future. However, the most striking narratives of loss – the backward-looking face of the Janus – were those we encountered in the nationalistmovement. The nation had rural roots which were celebrated andrevisited, in German, or Basque or Serb public cultures, and this providedthe particularistic ‘bite’ (Nairn 1997: 104) that made people different.Rural ‘ethnic’ particularity could be incorporated into a ‘forward-looking’vision, and into a state-building movement which embraced economicdevelopment, citizenship and the rule of law. This is how nationalismyokes cultural particularity to universalising modernity. However, for

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Nairn the danger is that rural ethnicity remains forever backward-looking. Unlike the rural Arcadia beloved of Serb or Basque nationalists,his own representation of the rural world is an oubliette from whichemerges all the dark forces of contemporary nationalism. Peasants areto Frenchmen as tradition is to modernity, and as emotion is to reason.

None of these images is very helpful in understanding the politics ofnationalist mobilisation. Peasants should not be invoked to explain thepassions of nationalism – the uncomfortable survival of emotion in theage of reason. Peasant societies are neither heaven nor hell, and they arecertainly not timeless. They do in many cases have a strong tendencytowards social closure, and once those boundaries become synonymouswith those of the nation, as we saw in the Basque provinces and inBosnia, they become very powerful and resistant. But do peasants loomout of the past to haunt the nation? The way in which peasant culturebecomes national culture – the way rurality is invoked in nationalistdiscourse and peasants themselves are incorporated into nationalistmovements – all originate with social forces outside the peasant world.

This brings us to the more difficult conceptual question about the‘semantics of time’ and how we represent social change. Nairn’s imageof the mill-race, and the multi-generational struggle between the ruralpast and the urban–industrial future, is a striking image of tumult, anda reminder that there is an interaction between rural and urban.However, a mill-race only takes people in one direction. Gribaudi’s(1987) study of the Torinese working class, or Holmes’ (1989) study ofthe ‘worker-peasants’ of Friuli document a two-way movement, andshow that people, over their working lives, moved back and forthbetween factory employment and their agricultural holdings. Theevidence from Yugoslavia, when an industrialising economy imploded,shows in a more dramatic way that modernisation (and ‘modernity’) arereversible. In Yugoslavia and elsewhere, people were recycled from ruralto urban and back again, sucked in and spat out. In each case the ruralworld comes to represent stability and continuity – the roots to whichone returns in periods of crisis.

The issue of representation needs one last comment. The idea thatpeasant worlds are static is an urban myth. Many of the crucial featuresof peasant society only emerged after the abolition of feudal relations inthe nineteenth century, and even after they were penetrated by marketrelations (or by socialist reorganisation) in the twentieth century. Theymay have changed at a different rhythm to the city (and the city waslargely indifferent to what was happening), but in all the countries ofsouthern and eastern Europe they also went through periods of extraor-dinary transformation, economically and culturally. Tradition, as Hall


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(1992) and others have remarked, is the word given to what we arelosing. However, even if, for the sake of argument, we describe the ruralworld as static, experiences are cumulative, and an urban worker whohas been temporarily or permanently ‘recycled’ cannot simply returnhome, or return to the past. Such individuals may reveal themselves asfervently attached to a particular conception of work, property andhousehold continuity, but it will have a dimension which is missing forsomebody who has never left, or lost their livelihood. In Bourdieu’s terms,all the things that go without saying have now been said. The heightenedmoral discourse around households and homelands which is such astriking feature of many nationalist movements is not in any simple sensea step backwards; nor does it involve atavistic figures who come back tohaunt us. It is more likely to derive from the co-existence of theknowledge of different worlds, to be ‘after-modernity’ rather than areturn to the past.

POLITICS AND SOCIAL PROCESS

These political movements were both a reaction to the large-scale trans-formations of society in the last century, and themselves part of thathistory, shaping the direction in which society moved. Much energy hasgone into explaining why political movements occurred in the place thatthey did: factor x, (or x, y and z acting together) produced class struggleor nationalism. But European history is resistant to these kinds of gen-eralisation: central Italy goes through long periods of class mobilisationin the absence of a proletariat; a powerful explanation of Catalannationalism is built around factors which are missing in the Basqueprovinces. The intensity of ethnic politics does not correlate with thedegree of cultural diversity: Freud once said that the Balkans were char-acterised by the narcissism of marginal differences (Sahlins 1999: 413),and we can accept an underlying truth in that even if we would con-ceptualise it differently. Wiegandt, in an intelligent review of eight casestudies designed to reveal the reasons for the presence or absence ofethnic mobilisation amongst rural populations, ends up concluding, ineffect, that it depended on historically specific factors affecting theinteraction between states and their minorities (Wiegandt 1993: 318).The most powerful theoretical frameworks for analysing political historyemploy concepts which are so generalised – capitalism, industrialism,modernisation – that they themselves have to be unpacked before theycan have much purchase on what is happening in any specific case. Thisis not to deny the value or stimulus that can come from the attempts toestablish very broad connections, but the next section will be a selective

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look at some of the processes which have emerged in the case studies,and in unpacking the generalising concepts.

Capitalism is an extraordinarily dynamic system in the speed of itsexpansion, and in the range of its transformations. As a result we caneasily write as though this way of organising production is a monolithicand unstoppable force of nature, and in doing so end up subscribing toanother kind of teleology. We need to keep in sight the global reach ofcapitalism and the enormous potential for accumulation inherent in thisway of organising an economy, but we also need to remember that thispotential is never realised in the abstract. It is realised, and society is re-ordered, through a combination of economic, technological and politicalcircumstances. It happens through collective agency, combinations ofeconomic and political actors who need not just to realise a profit but totransform the environment in which business is conducted. Togetherthey promote or obstruct land reforms, build railways or mobile phonenetworks, switch energy policies, deregulate finance or create singlemarkets. The dazzling rise of manufacturing industry in early twentieth-century Milan required (in no particular order) local entrepreneurs,hydro-electric power, German bankers, American knowhow and anItalian government keen to develop a national armaments industry. Theequally dazzling rise of Bilbao a generation earlier, or the industrialdistricts of the ‘Third Italy’ a generation later, were the product of asimilarly varied combination of interests and strategies.

All this suggests the importance of historical and geographicalvariations, and the last chapter noted that capitalism does not arrive inone hit. There are periods of accelerating change, when governmentswiden private property rights, abolish internal tariffs, create the com-munications infrastructure for a national market, and when there is amajor investment in new manufactures. Concentrating on thesedramatic periods can leave the impression that a society is from then onuniformly ‘capitalist’, moving inexorably forward. In reality, asinnumerable studies have shown, this is not a smooth or unilinearprocess, and it is precisely the uneven character of subsequentdevelopment which leads to some forms of political mobilisation.

It is uneven firstly because transformations do not happen uniformlyacross the economy, but move from sector to sector, sometimes veryslowly. The establishment of capitalist forms of organisation in Italy canbe dated to the industrial boom and liberal reforms of the Risorgimento(or even to the Renaissance cities), but 80 years after those reforms therewere still substantial parts of agriculture only partially incorporated intothe market and farmers who were still coming to terms with the hugecultural transformations intrinsic to a market rationality (see Pratt


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1994). At the end of the twentieth century (but before e-commerce) arevolution in retailing cut swathes through the small family businessesin the commercial sector, the backbone of many urban centres. This isthe dynamism of capitalist systems, creating new products and new tech-nologies, reorganising production and distribution so that new ‘profitzones’ emerge, often to displace household-based enterprises (Gudemanand Rivera 1990). There is a constant interaction with domestic labour,so that much food preparation now takes place in factories, whilehouseholds are persuaded to assemble their own furniture. Changingreturns to capital in an increasingly deregulated world also mean thatwhole sectors of industry can disappear or relocate to other parts of theglobe. Sesto San Giovanni, for decades one of the innovative centres ofItalian engineering, is in the year 2000 an industrial graveyard seekingfunds for reconversion.

The unevenness of capitalist development is also regional. Some placeshave a history of investment, and have developed dense infrastructures,a skilled labour force and an administrative and education system whichgive them a competitive advantage. This is the case in Silicon Valley orthe industrial districts of Italy (Bagnasco 1977; Sabel 1982), which areseen as sucking in capital investment and labour from poorer regions,accentuating regional disparities in an economic version of osmosis.There are disagreements about the factors which give such districts acompetitive advantage, and we can certainly overstate the stability ofany given regional pattern. Few looking at Andalusia’s ‘hungry coast’,one of the poorest places in Europe in the 1940s, would have imaginedthe Costa del Sol 50 years later. Nevertheless it is clear that in economicterms territory is not homogeneous space, and that massive regionaldisparities exist: using European Union classifications some regions haveaverage per capita incomes six times higher than others (Dunford 1996),and the disparity increases when we look to those countries seekingaccession. Given that the EU already incorporates almost all the mostprosperous parts of the continent, the economic gradient between thoseinside and those outside steepens with each enlargement.

A final kind of unevenness derives from the changing organisation ofproduction in capitalist economies. With evidence accumulated in thecentury since Marx’s death, few now believe that capitalism advancesonly through dispossession and a swelling multitude of wage-labourers.Agriculture was always out of step with this prognosis: the employmentof wage-labourers boomed in southern Europe at the end of thenineteenth century, and for a long time these labourers outnumberedthose in industry. But this was based on traditional labour-intensivetechnology, and the mechanisation of agriculture led to the dominance

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of family farming. Textile production was once mostly in the hands ofartisans, but was then re-organised in factories driven by steam andelectrical power, and now sections of it are fragmented back intohousehold forms. An evolving combination of factors, from technolo-gical innovation and fiscal policy to changes in the pattern of consumerdemand, mean that production processes are constantly beingreorganised and involve a spectrum of economic actors. Freelancedesigners and consultants, wage-labourers, co-operatives of smallproducers, domestic out-workers may all be involved in one finishedproduct, while in the wider society we have to add in another largestratum: the poorest, often called the underclass, who derive no incomefrom employment at all.

We may identify a long-term dynamic within the economy, ‘theincreased accumulation of capital through the appropriation of surplusvalue’ (Narotzky 1997: 217), but this does not happen through a linearprocess, and appropriation can be realised in a variety of ways. The resultis considerable variation in the way production is organised, over timeand between economic sectors. With this in mind, we can go back to theissue of class, which as a term refers to both economic strata and politicalactors. The case studies dealt with classes as collective political actors,as they emerged in parts of southern Europe marked by social polarisa-tion, usually (but not invariably) the result of the formation of a criticalmass of wage-labourers in large enterprises in agriculture or industry.These classes formed the core of movements which foresaw either thespread of wage-labour relations to the entire economy and the revolu-tionary seizure and transformation of the state, or the creation of a newsociety based on local autonomy and equality. There were many otherdimensions to these movements – not least, in the first case, a strongbelief in the unfolding of historical laws and the inevitability of socialism.Neither of these programmes now looks remotely plausible, and theirproponents occupy a very marginal position in political life, but the‘death of class’ does not mean that capitalism has lost its dynamism, adynamism that comes precisely from the creation of disparities. Thishappens globally between north and south, and between the territorialregions of the industrialised states. In Italy the economic gap betweennorth and south has increased during the last 50 years of state inter-vention. Disparities are also internal to a society; stratification can beanalysed in a number of ways, and class remains the main term used torefer to these strata and to structured economic inequality (Coole 1996:17). In that sense class did not die with class movements; economicdisparities have continued within industrialised societies, and increasedin those which embraced neo-liberalism (Krugman 1994). These


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disparities shape people’s lives in many ways, but ‘class politics’ in thiscontext refers to a very different process from the kind of polarisation wehave examined. One statistically defined stratum does not mobiliseagainst the others.

Nevertheless, political mobilisation around structured inequalitiesdoes continue. Naomi Klein is one of those who have documented someof the astonishing accumulation of capital by transnational corporationsin the last 20 years. Here too we should not see this recent expansion asnatural, but as an historical phenomenon generated out of acombination of processes and strategies, not least deregulation. Kleinconcentrates on the Dutch auction over labour costs and workplacediscipline which has led to the transfer of manufacturing from the oldindustrial centres to the export zones of Mexico, the Philippines andsouthern China. Her comment, ‘In this new globalized context, thevictories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of thefurniture while the house burnt down’ (Klein 2000: 123), is an attack onthe loss of radical economic analyses in movements built on identitypolitics, but it cannot be taken as an argument for the return of earlierforms of class mobilisation.

Her work documents some of the new configurations of concentrationand dispersal. The vast financial power of many corporations makescontrolling them through ‘normal’ political means – political parties andstate legislation – virtually impossible, since they can force open markets,dictate to governments, and if necessary buy them off. The fragmentationand dispersal of the production system make it harder to achieveworkplace solidarity, and create new patterns of dependency. A secondstrand in her study is privatisation – of services, utilities, property, publicspaces and scientific knowledge. Klein then explores the strengths andweaknesses of new political movements, including environmental andhuman rights activists, union organisers in north and south, fair traders,consumer groups and culture jammers. Many of these are mobilisedaround a strong sense of locality, and some acknowledge an olderanarchist agenda in their strategies. We saw in the last chapter that thepolitics of the local, and of territorial identities, are of growingimportance, but also that they have many faces. When not linked to aconcern with global processes and some measure of co-ordination, theycan become largely conservative and exclusionary. Conversely, fromKlein’s perspective, there are limits to ‘internet’ activism and interna-tional rallies if they are not rooted in local campaigns. So there ismobilisation, especially around the twin themes of corporate powerand privatisation, but it is not class mobilisation, and it is certainlynot a Leninist mobilisation, much to the disappointment of media

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commentators looking for leaders and ideologies to criticise. Most of theother issues are still open: the substantive links between the variouspolitical agendas, the durability of the coalition, and the effectiveness ofemerging political strategies. These will be key questions in twenty-first-century politics.

However, they will not be the only questions; others will arise from thechanging political sovereignty of regions, nation-states and the EuropeanUnion. A strong theme running through the case material has been theconsolidation of states from the nineteenth century onwards ashomogeneous spaces marked by territorial boundaries. The concept ofhomogeneity emerges in many discussions of the modern state (seeVerdery 1994: 45) and can be seen as a way of taking forward Weber’sanalysis of rationality and the drive to consistency and efficiency (Gellner1983: 20) in the ordering of many realms of modern society. Withoutgoing into debates about the priority of one social realm over another,we can mention some of the processes.

One dimension of this homogeneity is economic. Nationalists generallyadvocated protectionism against external competition, moving controlsover the movement of goods to their frontiers, while removing all internaltariff barriers. This creation of a national market was further stimulatedby massive investment in internal means of communication: roads,railways, telegraph. The leitmotif of policy was ‘getting things moving’,ripping out any internal obstructions, so that, in a favourite metaphor,the health and growth of the nation depended on movement, just likeblood coursing through the body. This is the dynamic of a marketeconomy: that the same forces operate throughout a territory even if, aswe have already seen, the result is usually an increased disparity in thedistribution of wealth. The rationality of socialist economies manifestedanother form of order in the planning and allocation systems whichapplied throughout state territory, drafting the people-as-workers intostrategically decided production roles.

State practice assumes and generates uniform procedures in manyother institutional fields: in the creation of a universal rule of law andthe rights associated with citizenship, in the practice of public (andprivate) bureaucracies. It is not that such a system of governmentnecessarily eliminates patronage or creates equity, it is that it eliminatesthe right to differential treatment on the part of particular sections ofsociety, or localities which had existed in earlier regimes. In the contextof government Verdery notes that

a homogenising policy creates the ‘nation’ as consisting of all those the stateshould administer, because they all ostensibly ‘have something in common’.State subjects are most frequently encouraged to have ‘in common’ (besides theirgovernment) shared culture and/or ‘ethnic’ origin. (Verdery 1994: 45)


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It is in this context that we encounter the most famous arguments ofnationalism – the way the state creates linguistic uniformity through thestandardisation of a vernacular language, and its use throughout stateinstitutions, not least the newly compulsory state education system.Schooling, literacy and the development of the media in turn lead to thedevelopment of a national language, literature and history – a degree ofcultural standardisation which is contested, partly mythical but alsopartly realised.

The point of this brief sketch is simply to draw attention to thecomplexity of these social transformations, and to the various dimensionsthat unfold at different speeds and interact in different ways in localcontexts. The experiences described in this book were from those sectionsof society that were losing out in these transformations and sought apolitical solution, though we should not forget the millions who leftsouthern Europe and migrated to the Americas. But there were manykinds of dislocation, and the result was a cross-cutting set of divisions,and often a variety of potential political programmes: not just an impov-erished peasantry, but a Catholic, Euskardi-speaking peasantry; not justa wage-labourer but an agricultural labourer immersed in the anti-Catholic moral codes of the pueblo. Small farmers, craft workers, tradersand other parts of the ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ did not simply lose theirincomes, they lost their livelihoods and their property, and their skillsbecame valueless. Their associations and networks were disbanded alongwith their political position within local society, as the new circuits ofcapital came to dominate. Older forms of knowledge and skills weredevalued, and their previous distribution within society becameirrelevant: this was a profound cultural revolution and became dramaticwith the generalised introduction of schooling, so that the key processesof cultural acquisition were organised by the state and fell outside localcontrol. There is a marked impact on social divisions, since literacy is aprerequisite for operating successfully in a widening market, and to moveinto the new professions; only the more slow-moving, local and‘informal’ sectors of the economy can continue to operate without it. Theconsequences of this are even more dramatic if the language of the stateis significantly different from the local vernacular, and this is one of best-researched aspects of European nationalism.

Hroch (1985: 177–91) and other scholars have devoted particularattention to the political options and strategies of the ‘middle strata’comprising both the economic actors (artisans, traders, small-businessowners) and the professionals or intellectuals (clergy, lawyers, teachers).Did they think that they would have a stake in the new kind of societyemerging or did they oppose it? Were they united in their response, and

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with whom would they ally in opposition? In the Basque provinces, forexample, where the emerging class divide and linguistic divides fell indifferent places, the situation was very fluid. In the end the majority ofthese urban middle strata of intellectuals and small businessmenembraced Basque nationalism and allied with the peasantry; in slightlydifferent circumstances they could have been included in a ChristianDemocrat movement which championed household enterprises on apan-Spanish basis. In the same period, but in a region with a differenteconomic history, the Milanese artisans became a founding force in theSocialist Party. The rural populations of eastern Europe in the first halfof the twentieth century were also active in, or co-opted by, a variety ofpolitical movements: populist–nationalism, green agrarian internation-alism, and the red Communist International.

These comments suggest that the political configuration whichemerges in the complexity of the nation-building process is highlyvariable. It depends on many factors, including the forces whichdominate within the state and the linkages between centres and regions.In the context of nationalism, Heiberg (1989: 231–43) has pointed tothe distinction between societies where local elites or notables were co-opted into the state machinery, and those where this did not happen. Italso depends on timing: the gap between the destruction of existing modesof livelihood and the eventual arrival of new resources. For the other sideto this ‘open’ economic and political space is the drive to create nationaleconomies through investment and protectionism for strategic economicsectors, since only the strong (like Britain in the nineteenth century)favoured free trade. These ‘Fordist’ economies of mass production andconsumption were national in the sense that they were owned by andproduced for nationals; autonomy (achieved without trade) was oftenvalued since it reduced dependence, while foreign ownership wasconsidered a threat to national interests. Taxation systems were the basefor public expenditure; the levels of both were politically contested, butled overall to the development of public education and ‘cradle-to-grave’welfare systems which were very important in the formation ofcitizenship and nationhood. So the state always had a multiple role,providing much of the infrastructure and regulatory system necessaryfor capitalist operations, but also as a potential mechanism for redistrib-uting wealth between regions and sectors, counteracting theinegalitarian dynamic of the market (Wicker 1997).

This model of culturally homogeneous, economically autonomous,politically sovereign states was never completely achieved, but it is nowbeing significantly eroded, the directions reversed. Globalisation isanother overworked term. One of Klein’s informants in the Philippines


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reminded her that it had always been part of a global society (Klein 2000:439) – at least since the sixteenth century, when the Spaniards movingwest met the Chinese moving east. But though many phenomena arenot as new as is sometimes claimed, there has been over the last twodecades a novel series of interlocking processes, including thedevelopment of information technology, deregulation of capitalmovements, trade liberalisation and new patterns of migration. TheEuropean Union has consolidated itself as a supranational entity, andbecome one of the poles in the new patterns of production and trade.Again it is possible to overestimate the scale of these changes, but theircumulative impact has been felt in all spheres: an increase in certainforms of cultural heterogeneity, a reduction in sovereignty, in theboundedness of national economies, and in the state’s capacity to redis-tribute wealth, undermined by the ability of the largest corporations andthe most successful professionals to avoid taxation by operating transna-tionally (Reich 1991).

If globalisation produces weak states, it does not necessarily weakennationalism. All these processes generate reactions. Political forces inexisting states can mobilise opposition to loss of power to Brussels, or overthe growth of transnational migration, by reasserting the rights of nation-states. Often such movements obscure the economic processes which leadto loss of sovereignty, and stress the threat to the national way of life,represented in very traditional terms. The growth of regional disparitiesand the incapacity or unwillingness of governments to alleviate them cangenerate or reactivate ethno-nationalist movements within existingstates, in both prosperous and disadvantaged regions. The strengthen-ing of the European Union opens up a conceptual as well as an economicspace for rethinking the existing map of nations, as we saw in the previouschapter. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe has also generatedstrongly nationalistic movements – not through unleashing sleepinggiants freeze-dried by Stalinism, but as a consequence of the centralisedallocation systems of communism itself and the chaotic circumstances ofmany ‘transitions’. Nationalism and autocratic governments haveemerged both in those societies which embarked on shock-therapy lib-eralisation, and in those which witnessed a retrenchment of state power(in the economy, media and military). Yugoslavia was a tragic exampleof what could go wrong in a region where renewed conflict around therelationship between states and minorities had led to a process of politicalreconfiguration (see Brubaker 1996).

Events in eastern Europe are sometimes dramatic and destructive, butreconfiguration is occurring throughout Europe, as the economic,political and cultural processes pull in opposite directions. In an

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increasingly unbounded world, some political parties and movementsrespond to this by advocating the strengthening of nation-states, evenas supranational forms of government are consolidating. Others aremoving to scale down the units of government, to reinforce democracyat the level of regions or ‘sub-nations’, and counteract the centralisedand largely unaccountable powers of the European Union. Such devel-opments have many virtues, but they do not necessarily solve the‘problem’ of cultural heterogeneity; in fact they may be counter-productive in the development of a politics of cultural pluralism, and inthemselves simply displace the wider problems of redistribution whichwere previously fought out at the level of the nation-state. Politicalmovements address different parts of the configuration, and there is avariety of views about what a new map might look like – if indeed a mapis not an outdated metaphor. The only consensus is that Europe is at thebeginning of a period of accelerating change, and that the outcomes areuncertain.

We should be open-minded in analysing those outcomes. This bookstarted by expressing dissatisfaction with the tendency to lock the studyof class and nationalist movements into incommensurable paradigms,so that political action was fuelled by totally different kinds of peopleand motives. In one world we found economic categories of peopledriven by material interests, in the other cultural subjects consumed bypassions; analysis of the first would start with the labour process, thesecond with identity and representation. Twentieth-century Europeanhistory does not always fit into such categorisations. We saw that classmobilisation in Italy triggered competing versions of Italian identity,while civil wars in Spain, Finland and Greece have been seen as bothnational and class struggles.

I have highlighted the work of historians and social scientists whohave implictly or explicitly broken with the desire to construct neat boxesfor categorising political movements, and have revealed the complexinteractions between different kinds of social change, together with thespectrum of political responses to them. This is not an argument thatanything goes or anything is possible – revolutionary socialism continuesto be a very different kind of animal from Lombard separatism. It is simplya reminder that similar processes may generate very different politicalmovements. Economic restructuring, for example, has a major impacton territories and regions, and this is reflected, perhaps increasingly, inmovements concerned with the defence of livelihoods. It is also areminder that comparable (not identical) processes may be going on invery different movements. In the Introduction I suggested people livingthrough periods of rapid change and dislocation forge an identity and an


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interpretation of history which makes their own experiences central ina narrative of how society should be, and forge a political strategy tomake that happen. Political anthropology has a particular role inbuilding an understanding of these movements, because it unpacks theabstractions of capitalism or nation-building, and provides a contextwhich can bring into one framework the analysis of issues as diverse asthe labour process and identity narratives. The book will have served itspurpose if it helps others think about the different political configurationsemerging and ask further questions about them.

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References 209

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abertzale (patriot) 110, 129Agnelli, Giovanni 35agrarian parties 133, 158, 175agriculture 53–5, 131–2, 193–4

see also rural societyAlava 116, 121, 129Albania 151Albanians 139, 148, 151Alleanza Nazionale 170, 174Amendola, Giovanni 83anarchism 20, 45, 46–53, 62–5, 89, 97

and class struggle 15, 59–61, 93–4and freedom 49, 63and gender relations 57–8historical importance of 64–5and literacy 49, 91and millenarianism 62–3, 97and money 52and new political movements 195and repression 47, 48, 51and revolutionary action 47, 51, 52,

58–62, 63–4and socialism 32, 47and strikes 50, 51, 52, 61–2, 94and territory 92‘The Idea’ 49and women’s emancipation 49

anarcho-syndicalism 21, 33, 46, 49–50,64, 168

Andalusia 21, 46–65, 98, 193anarchism 20, 46–53, 63, 91, 93and anarcho-syndicalism 49–50, 168famine 48, 193gender relations 57–8and general strike 51, 52, 61–2, 63land reform 8and latifundia 53–5political mobilisation 22, 90revolutionary action 58–62and rural society 46, 53–5, 63, 104

and seasonal migrants 56–7workplace resistance 55–8, 90

Anderson, Benedict 1, 3, 10, 11, 12, 82Anderson, Perry 5anti-terrorist forces (GAL), Spain 127Appadurai, A. 18Arana, Sabino de 105–7, 108–9, 110,

123Arkan 154artisans 36–7, 42, 93, 189, 194, 198

mutual aid societies 31–2and political mobilisation 37–8

Ascaso, F. 51Austria 149, 152, 177Austro-Hungarian empire 132, 144auzoak 113, 114, 162Avanti 33, 40Aya, R. 22, 54, 65

Badinter Commission 152Bagnasco, A. 171Bailey, F.G. 115Bakunin, M. 48Balkans 191

land-reform 8, 133, 134political movements 132–3rural society 131–3territorial conflict 144–5urban society 133see also Bosnia; Yugoslavia

Basque country 101–30Basque–Spanish relations 109, 117,

119, 120, 124bilingualism 111, 123collective nobility 103, 107culture 113, 115, 118–19, 123foralism 104, 105, 107and historical continuity 118–19, 185and independence 120, 126

210

INDEX

Compiled by Sue Carlton

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industrialisation 102, 104–5, 106,116, 121

language see Euskeramigrants 116–18, 129national discourse 102–21nationalist identity 101, 106, 107–8,

118, 123, 129, 185–6nationalist movement 102, 105–11,

118–21, 162and Catholicism 106, 107, 108,110, 112, 119confirming social divisions 117, 120dual agenda 120–1militancy 113and rural society 13, 111–18see also ETA

as political entity 102–3and racism 107–8, 110, 115, 123repression 113, 116, 121–2, 127role of landlords 103, 111rural society 103, 104, 111–18segregation 116–17, 129, 163–4and socialism 106, 113, 121, 128surnames 107–8urban society 103–4, 112, 198voluntary associations 113–14, 162,

163, 186Basque diaspora 109, 115Basque Nationalist Party 107Basqueness 107–8, 110, 111basserias 103, 105, 108, 112basseritarak 112, 113, 116batzokis 109Bauman, Z. 99, 100Bax, M. 147begovi 141Beissinger, M. 13Belgium 177Belgrade 133, 134, 146Bell, D. 29, 30, 31–2, 36, 44Ben-Ami, S. 130Benetton 172Berlinguer, Enrico 69, 83Berlusconi, Silvio 81, 170, 174bienno rosso 26Bilbao 8, 104, 105, 106, 110, 129, 186Boggs, C. 86Bojicic, V. 136Bologna 86Bonifazi, E. 80Bordiga, Amadeo 37Borromeo, Carlo 39

Bosnia 134, 135, 159cultural diversity in 140–8, 157dismemberment 149–50, 152–3ethnic polarisation 164language and ethnicity 141–2nacija 140, 141–2, 143, 145–6, 147,

162, 186and nationalism 144–5, 162politicisation of difference 144–5, 163

Bosnia-Herzegovina 149, 150Bosnian Muslims 138, 140, 141, 144,

150, 163‘ethnic Muslims of Bosnia’ 139, 145,

151Bossi, Umberto 170, 171, 174, 175Bourdieu, P. 14, 191Breda 26, 29, 37, 91Brenan, G. 48–9, 52, 57, 65Breslavia (Wroclaw) 1Bringa, T. 145, 147, 159Britain

craft workers 37labour history 35, 45

Brubaker, R. 158Bulgaria 133Burgos 121

Cambodia 188–9campanilismo 77–8capital accumulation 194, 195capitalism 4, 8, 42, 88, 93, 191–4

Catholicism and 106‘fast-capitalism’ 177monopoly 94, 185nationalism and 7, 112–13, 123

capoccia 73Carlism 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 119Carlist wars (1833-39, 1872-76) 104Carrero Blanco, Luis 125Casa del Popolo 82, 91Casa Viejas uprising (1933) 47, 51, 52,

65Catalonia 46, 64, 176, 178, 179, 191Cathar heresy 166Catholic Church

and gender relations 57and Italian Communist Party (PCI) 71,

83–4, 85, 94–5and Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 33social doctrine 20, 106

Catholic Party, Italy 78caudrillas 114, 116–17, 122, 127, 162

Index 211

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Chauvin, Nicolas 188Chetniks 135Chile 69China 195chivatos (police informers) 115, 126Chomsky, N. 46, 65Christian Democracy 20, 89, 106Cincars 140–1circoli 90, 91Circolo Avvenire 32, 40citizenship 8, 139, 157, 198civil society 70, 71, 183Clark, N. 45, 122, 127, 130class 13–18, 87–9, 93–4, 185, 194–5

death of 2, 15, 97–100, 194and ethnicity 2, 6–7, 129, 169as master narrative 96mobilisation 14–15, 16, 27, 30, 31–5,

90political construction of 16, 88, 97and social and cultural differences

95–6class consciousness 87, 92class discourse 8, 9, 16, 88, 91, 92–3, 94,

95, 99, 185class identity 16, 35–41, 60–1, 90class movements 8, 14–17, 35–41, 94,

95, 186, 194as alliances 90, 91, 93creating 31–5end of 15, 98–100and identities 181–4, 185leadership 91local and national objectives 92and populism 176, 178–9and revolution 98and territory 92, 95and vision of future 88–9

class politics 1–2, 4, 14, 16, 20, 195class-for-itself 14, 87class-in-itself 14, 87Clemente, P. 86CNT (anarchist confederation) 50, 51Cold War 8

and Italian politics 67, 69, 72, 81, 83,84, 94, 170

Collier, G.A. 65Committees of National Liberation 68communism 4, 42, 61

and anarchism 46collapse of 8, 20, 199

Communist International 198

Communist Party 50, 133and collective identity 96–7see also Italian Communist Party

Confederazione Generale del Lavoro 36consumption, and identity construction

99contadini 72, 75Conversi, D. 122, 130Coole, D. 181Corbin, J. 64, 65cortijos 53, 54craft unions 33, 34craftsmen see artisansCroatia 135, 145, 149, 151–2, 153, 154,

155nationalism 134, 136, 148

Croatian diaspora 152Croats 132, 133, 138–9, 145, 151–2,

155in Bosnia 140, 145

Culhoun, C.J. 37cultural diversity 138–48, 157, 158culture 3, 96

authenticity 164, 167ethnicity and 5, 115, 118, 120, 142and identity 164nationalism and 4–5, 6–7, 12–13, 20,

142, 161, 164shared 5, 12–13

cumplir (compliance) 57

Davidson, A. 45, 86Davis, J. 19Dayton Agreement (1995) 150democracy 35, 65, 98, 125–6, 175

Italian Communist Party and (PCI)67–8, 70, 86, 94

Denich, B. 146Diaz del Moral, Juan 58, 60dictatorships 125, 126difference, politicisation of 144–5, 186diglossia 115Il Domani 40doppiezza 68–9Douglass, W.A. 130Dyker, D. 158

Eastern Europe 13, 20egoismo 52Elgeta 111, 116, 117, 120Emilia-Romagna 72, 80, 171equality 21, 36


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españolistas 124essentialism 182, 183–4, 186ETA (Euzkardi and Freedom) 102, 117,

121–30and Catholicism 123and class struggle 124, 125, 126,

128–9exiting from 127factions and alliances 124–5guerrilla warfare 125and Marxism 122, 123–4and self-determination 122as Third Worldists 124, 125and violence 122–3, 124, 125, 126,

127, 128, 129see also Basque country, nationalist

movementethnic cleansing 113, 145, 154–6, 161ethnic politics 1–2, 4, 191ethnicity 8, 22, 102, 143–4

and class 2, 6–7, 129, 169and culture 5, 115, 118, 120, 142and language 141–2and nacije 140, 141and social context 146, 186

ethno-nationalism 177, 187, 188–9ethnogenesis 101, 144ethnos 165Europe 12, 18–20

and democracy 98nationalism 166, 177new social movements 15political reconfiguration 199–200

European Union 8, 20, 193, 199, 200and economic integration 177enlargement 121, 138, 151, 193and Lega Nord 173–4recognition of Slovenia and Croatia

152single currency 170and wine-growers of Languedoc 168

Euskadito Ezkerra (EE) 124Euskera 102, 105, 107, 111, 112,

115–16preservation/promotion of 109, 110,

117, 123, 129suppression of 113, 121

exploitation 30, 40, 169

factoriesinnovation 29management practices 29, 30, 33, 38

organisation of labour force 29–30regulations 29, 30

factory council movement 33, 45factory workers 27–31

alienation 38, 40, 42, 44autonomy and hierarchy 36, 38and class identity 28and competition 30, 44employment conditions 30, 33, 39exploitation 30, 40factory occupation 33, 34and gender 28, 30skilled and unskilled 28–9, 30, 31,

36–9, 40, 42, 45solidarity 30–1, 35, 44wages 34

Falange 117Falck, steel mills 30, 37Fanelli, Guiseppe 48–9Fascist Syndicate 58‘fast-capitalism’ 177fattoria 74felibrige 167feste 82Fiat 35Field of Blackbirds 148Fini, Gianfranco 170Finland 200Fordism 98, 198Forza Italia 170, 174Foweraker, J. 65, 96–7France 188

‘Red South’ 160, 166–70Franco, Francisco 47, 48, 58, 113, 121Fraser, R. 65free love 57French Revolution 12Freud, S. 182, 191Friuli 190fueros 103, 104, 106

Garibaldi, Giuseppe 13Geertz, C. 84Gellner, E. 1, 3, 4–7, 11, 12, 92, 187, 189gemeinschaft 18gender 16, 28, 30, 56, 57–8general strike 21, 91, 93, 168

and class division 9, 62, 63, 94, 186and control of public space 95

Genesis 184Germany 152Gill, D. 86

Index 213

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Gilmore, D. 65Giorgetti, G. 86Glenny, M. 155, 158globalisation 198–9Goddard, V.A. 19Gowan, P. 153Gramsci, A. 41, 42–3, 45, 70, 83, 86,

183and anarcho-syndicalism 32–3and revolutionary politics 32–3, 34,

43, 93Greece 95, 152, 200Greek Civil War 68Green International 133Greenwood, D. 130Gribaudi, M. 44, 190Grossberg, L. 181–2, 183group identity, and historical continuity

1, 12, 39–40, 101, 118Guernica 113Guipazcoa 103Gypsies 139, 140, 141, 151

Hall, S. 86, 182, 190–1Halpern, J.M. and B.K. 159Heiberg, M. 108–11, 113–15, 117, 120,

127, 130, 198Herri Batasuna (Popular Unity) 129Herzegovina 147, 155Hobsbawm, E.J. 1, 2, 38–9, 45, 65, 187Holmes, D. 22, 177, 184, 190homology 165, 167, 185Hroch, M. 7, 197Hungarians 139, 151Hungary 151

identity 10, 96collective 96–7construction of 2, 96, 182and culture 11, 20, 164and difference 185–6and essentialism 182, 183–4, 185multiple 181, 182, 183and social practice 185–6

identity narratives 16, 39, 93, 96, 129,143

diachronic and synchronic 10–11, 12and historical continuity 176, 184

identity politics 2, 10, 181–4, 195ikastola 117, 123imagined communities 2, 13, 82, 185immigration, opposition to 15

Incontri, Marchese 75industrialisation 4, 8, 162, 187–8, 192,

193–4and conflict 5–7, 191and ethnic identity 146and political mobilisation 30, 31–4,

39–40reversibility of 190

industrymanufacturing 16worker participation 34, 35see also factories; factory workers

inequality 4, 14, 15Inno del Lavoratori 40integralism 177International Brotherhood 49internet activism 195Italian Christian-Democrat Party (DC) 78,

79, 84, 170, 171Italian Communist Party (PCI) 27, 42, 45,

67–72, 86, 93, 94–5alliance with Socialist Party 79and Catholic Church 71, 83–4, 85,

94–5and comradeship 81–2, 85and democracy 67–8, 70, 86, 94double strategy 68–9electoral success 71, 79and end of Cold War 170failures of 71–2, 80–1and fascism 68, 69, 70foundation of 31, 34, 67identity 81–5ideology and practice 70–1and land reform 79–80leaders of 83non-insurrectionary strategy 70opposition to monopoly capital 94, 185revolution-as-insurrection 68, 69, 70road metaphor 41, 82and Soviet communism 69, 70, 84, 94

Italian Socialist Party (PSI) 21, 32–3, 35,42, 74, 198

alliance with Communist Party 79maximalist wing 41reformist wing 34

Italyand capitalism 192–3class mobilisation 191, 200and Cold War 94corruption 173dialects 28, 171


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fascism 68, 76, 77internal divisions 171land reform 67, 78, 79migrants 28, 173, 174–5national identity 13, 83polarisation 32, 33, 34, 35, 77, 84, 86,

94Popular Party 78property 20–1‘red belt’ 71, 73rural leagues 74tax evasion 170, 172–3unemployment 21unification 20–1, 31, 74‘White North’ 160, 170–5see also Lombardy; Northern Italy;

Southern Italy; Tuscany

Janus 189–90Jasenovac 135Jaungoikua 108Jerez 49, 50, 51JNA (Yugoslavian army) 148, 155Juaristi, J. 130Just, R. 165

Kaldor, M. 158Kapferer, B. 18Kaplan, T. 50, 55, 62, 65Kertzer, D. 86Kideckel, D.A. 159Kielstra, N. 168Kiernan, B. 188Klein, N. 195, 198–9Kosovo 148, 150Krajina 155Krutwig, Federico 122Kultur 5

labour market flexibility 160, 162Laitin, D. 130land reform 8, 67, 78, 79, 133, 134language 5, 141–2, 165, 166–7, 197

linguistic pluralism 8see also Euskera

langue d’oc 166, 167Languedoc 168–9, 176Larramandi 103Larzac military base 168Lassalle, F. 1, 184latifundia 20, 53–5, 60, 65Lazar, Prince 156

Le Pen, Jean-Marie 177, 184Lega Nord 170, 171–5

activists 172electoral support for 171–2, 174and European Union 173–4and populism 175, 176–7and racism 172separatism and federalism 174and wealth redistribution 173, 178

Lem, W. 169, 178Levy, C. 45Li Causi, L. 85, 86liberty 49, 63, 84literacy 8, 21, 49, 91, 95Little, A. 158Llamas, Manuel 52Llobera, J.R. 19localism 171, 178–9, 180Lockwood, W.G. 140, 141–2, 143, 144,

147, 159Lombard League 170–1Lombardy 28, 170–2

dialect 171political mobilisation 170–1

Longo, Luigi 83loss, narrative of 130Lumley, R. 45, 86, 98Lyttleton, A. 86

Maastricht Treaty 152, 170, 172MacClancy, J. 130Macedonia 150, 152Madeconians 139mafia 173Major, John 156Malcolm, N. 156Malefakis, E.E. 65manovalenza 37manovali 37manual labour 37, 38–9, 59–61, 94Marelli factory 28, 29, 44Maremma 78Markovic, Ante 138Martinez-Alier, J. 55–8, 60, 65Marx, Karl 38, 46, 73Marxism 7, 68, 93

and class 14, 15, 87–8, 90and martyrs 3–4and nationalism 4proletariat 5, 10, 97and revolution 97scientific socialism 97

Index 215

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May, E. 65Mazower, M. 98mestiere 36, 37metalworkers union (FIOM) 33Mexico 195mezzadri (share-croppers) 66–7, 72–3, 74,

75, 76, 85and communist-socialist alliance

79–80migration of 81political mobilisation 77–9, 83, 86

mezzadria (share-cropping) system 66–7,71, 72–81

and commercial pressures 74–5, 76direct expropriation of surplus 92and fascism 76–7, 86landlords 72, 74–5, 76, 77, 78and social control 75stability of 73and voluntary partnership 76and war 76–7

migrants/migration 11, 162, 173, 174–5,177, 197, 199

Milan 8, 33, 37, 44, 47, 98, 198riots (1898) 31–2

Milosevic, Slobodan 138, 148, 151Mintz, J. 51, 52–3, 65Mistral, F. 167MLNV (Basque Liberation) 128modernisation 39, 191

see also industrialisationmodernity 1, 2, 5, 8, 173, 184, 187–91Mondragon 117Monroy, José 52Montenegrins 139Moro, Aldo 69, 70Mostar 149Muro-Ruiz, Diego 130Muslims see Bosnian MuslimsMussolini, Benito 41mutual aid societies 31–2, 42, 59

nacija 140, 141–2, 143, 145–6, 147,162, 186

Nairn, T. 187–90narod 139, 141narodnosti 139Narotzky, S. 88, 176, 178, 180nation(s)

and collective interest 9–10and common identity 11–12foundation 12, 185

and kinship 163and language 165making of 161–6as modern invention 161as natural unit 10, 161

nation-statesand globalisation 200homogeneity 196rights of 199and shared culture 12–13

national identity 165opposition and continuity 185–6

nationalism 8, 11–13, 161, 166and class movements 7and cross-border solidarities 163and culture 4–5, 6–7, 12, 20, 142,

161, 164and globalisation 199and historical continuity 101, 108,

118, 165, 181, 184and industrialisation 4–7and linguistic uniformity 197and modernity 1, 187–91and passion 2, 3and protectionism 196and race 166and violence 163

nationalist discourse 9–10, 17, 101,102–21

nationalist movements 17, 97, 101–30,160, 163

and new forms of solidarity 164, 165and populism 176see also Basque country, nationalist

movement; ETANATO 83Navarra 103, 113, 116new social movements 2, 8, 15–16, 65Northern Ireland 128, 130, 189Northern Italy 26–45, 178, 179

assistenzialismo 174fascism 35, 38, 41, 43leghe 170see also Lega Nord

nostalgia 167

obreros conscientes 49, 52, 62, 63Occitania 128, 166–70, 178

culture 166, 167, 169and direct action 169and economic crisis 167–8identity 166–7


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political mobilisation 167, 168–9relationship with French state 168, 169underdevelopment 169

October Revolution (1917) 70Olsen, M.K.G. 138Operation Gladio 69oppression 92, 98, 125, 165

see also anarchism, and repression;Basque country, repression

Ordine Nuovo group 40Ottoman empire 132, 144, 145

La Padania 173Pareja, Pepe 52, 53Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV)

109–11, 122, 123, 124, 128Association of Patriotic Women 110confirming social divisions 117electoral support 110, 126and rural society 111–18youth branch 109–10

Passerini, L. 35, 38, 40, 45, 96, 182passion 2, 3, 16patriot/patriotism 110, 129, 130Payne, S.G. 130Pazzagli, C. 75, 86peasant culture 190–1

see also rural societypeople, concept of 12Perugia 86Philippines 195phylloxera 168piecework 29, 30, 36, 38, 56, 57Pirelli 29Pitt-Rivers, J. 60pluralism 177, 200

see also cultural diversityPol Pot 188political movements 7–11, 15–16, 20, 182

combining class and nationalist themes160, 200

differences and similarities between 17and essentialism 183–4and inequalities 195internal politics of 184new 195–6and political action 9, 21, 22reasons for 191and social process 191–201vital infrastructure 91, 98–9see also class movements; nationalist

movements

populism 22, 128, 161, 166, 170, 172,175–80

Populist Parties 133populist-nationalism 198post-modernity 8Pratt, J.C. 86Primo de Rivera, Miguel 112primordialists 12privatisation 195production system 29, 40, 194, 195

and class 14, 15, 88decentralisation 98

proletariat 10, 35, 38, 42–3, 93, 97and death of class 15dictatorship of 94industrial 37, 89and shared culture 5and working-class 88

property rights 8, 16, 89, 95, 96protectionism 196, 198PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party)

105public spaces, control of 16, 95Pueblo Trabajador Vasco (Basque working

people) 124pueblos 53, 92, 117, 124

agricultural labourers from 53, 56and general strike 51, 62as moral entity 114–15, 116and sindicato 50, 90

Puglia 20–1, 22, 168

race 107, 110, 115, 129, 165–6racism 15, 107–8, 123, 172, 185Radic, Stjepan 133Radosevic, S. 138Red Brigades 69, 123red flag 1, 16, 184Red Flag 40‘Red Years’, Italy 33–4, 45, 73, 76, 78reformism 44, 98, 99regions/regionalism 19–20, 178–80Renan, Ernest 166reparto 58–9, 62Rerum Novarum 106revolution 27, 41, 42–3, 45, 68–70, 97

as insurrection 68, 69, 70as process 70, 94and reformism 98, 99

Rigola, Rinaldo 36, 37Risorgimento 170, 173, 178, 192Romagna 28

Index 217

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Rome 173rural society 53–5, 162, 187–91, 198

and authentic culture 164, 167as static 190–1

Russian Revolution (1917) 133Rwanda 189Rygier, Maria 21

St Gotthard Pass 26Sarajevo 146, 149, 154, 186Sassoon, D. 86Scott, D. 18Scott, J.C. 60‘semantics of time’ 184, 190Sephardic Jews 140Serbia 131, 138, 148, 149, 154

nationalism 134, 135Serbian Socialist Party 148Serbs 132, 133, 138–9, 145

aggression of 151, 155in Bosnia 140, 150in Croatia 149, 155

Sereni, E. 79, 80, 86Sesto San Giovanni 26–35, 44, 61, 82, 85

Communist Party 27, 31, 82engineering industry 26, 193factory workers 27–31, 44fascism 26–7, 28, 35political mobilisation 37, 39–40, 42,

43, 90, 97, 183population 26and socialism 26, 31unionisation 31, 33women workers 28, 44, 91working-class movements 183

Sewell, W.H. Jr. 8, 9, 99sharia courts 144Shore, C. 19, 86Sicily 22Silber, L. 158Silicon Valley 193Silverman, S. 85–6sindicato 49–50, 90Skoplje Polje 140–2Slovenes 133, 139Slovenia 149, 152small business sector 179, 180Smith, A.D. 161Snowden, F.M. 21–2, 86Social Democrats, Europe 71socialism 15, 26, 31, 39, 70

and anarchism 32, 47Catholicism and 106, 113

Italy 26, 31, 70scientific 97Spain 113, 121, 128

Socialist Party, in Languedoc 168Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di Sesto San

Giovanni 31solidarity 96, 184

general strike and 51new forms of 164, 165and political movements and 15, 17share-croppers 66unión 52, 55–7, 58and violence 128working class 9, 30–1, 35, 43, 44,

60–1, 90, 195Sorabji, C. 144, 146, 147, 159Southern Italy 8, 20, 21–2Soviet Union 98, 135Spain

and anarchism 46–53devolution 126diversity 102equal pay 58and European Union accession 121land redistribution 59liberalism 104migrant workers 10police informers 115recession 121repression 48transition to democracy 125–6unemployment 58see also Andalusia; Basque country

Spanish Civil War (1936-39) 47, 48, 51,62, 63, 102, 113, 200

Spanish Socialist Party 128Spriano, P. 45Stalin, Joseph 135Stamboliski, Alexander 133state, multiple role 198state centralisation 8, 13state sovereignty 9, 198, 199state violence 127strikes 33–4, 40, 78, 88

see also general strikeSullivan, J. 124, 130Switzerland 177symbols 2, 17, 40, 164syndicalism 21, 168synechdoche 164

taxation 198tax evasion 170, 172–3tax strikes 168


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Taylorism 29, 37, 44territory 92, 95, 139–40, 144–5, 151–2,

160, 165textile production 194Therborn, G. 184‘Third Italy’ 171, 192Thompson, E.P. 45, 87Tito, Josip Broz 135, 136, 143Todos o ninguno 58Togliatti, Palmiro 68, 69, 70, 83, 85Touraine, A. 130, 167, 169–70, 176,

177, 178trabajo 59–61trade unionism 16, 31, 33, 37, 90tradition 190–1transnational corporations 195Tudjman, Franjo 148, 152Turin

working class 35, 44, 190mobilisation 31, 33–4, 40, 45, 47

Tuscany 66–86class identity 99class movement 95, 98and communist identity 81–5, 86, 171farmers’ co-operative 81localism 77–8mezzadria (share-croppers) 72–81,

90–1, 171migrant workers from 28political mobilisation 90–1

uneven development 7, 192–3unión (solidarity) 52, 55–7, 58L’Unità 82United Nations 149, 150United States 83, 94, 150, 151Urbinati, N. 86Urla, J. 123, 130Ustache 134–5, 152, 154

Vance–Owen peace plan 152Vatican 152Vejvoda, I. 158Veneto 171, 172Verdery, K. 196villas 103–4, 108violence

and nationalism 163and solidarity 128spiral of 127Yugoslavia 153–6see also ETA, and violence

Vizcaya 102, 103, 104, 107, 110, 119,121

Vojvodina 135, 148Vukovar 149VVAP (Volem vivre al pais) 167, 177

wage-labour 16, 193–4anarchism and 60–1artisans and 36, 60Communist Party (PCI) and 67, 93and role of proletariat 42, 88, 93share-croppers and 74–5wine-growers of Languedoc 168, 169

We are all neighbours (Granada television)147, 159

wealth, redistribution 173, 178, 198Weber, Max 7, 196welfare systems 198‘white leagues’ 78Wiegandt, E. 191Wieviorka, M. 123, 126, 127–8, 130, 169Williams, G. 37, 43, 45Williams, R. 182Willson, P. 28, 29, 44wine-growers, Languedoc 168–9, 176Wolf, E. 19women 32, 89

and class movements 91–2factory work 28, 44rights 21, 49

Woodward, S. 137, 151, 155, 157, 158work

ethic 37, 38, 60ideology of 40–1and person 35–8, 93

workers see factory workers; manuallabour; wage-labour

workers’ movements 37, 38–9, 42reformism 44, 98revolutionary goals 42–3, 45songs and symbols 40workplace resistance 40, 55–8, 90

workers’ organisations 35, 36working class 8, 16, 40, 89

identity 35–41, 43–4, 93–4, 96images of 38–9moral code 36, 40, 42and proletariat 88solidarity 9, 30–1, 35, 43, 44, 60–1,

90, 195

xenophobia 161, 175, 177, 179, 188

Index 219

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Yugoslavia 131–59, 189causes of conflict 150–1, 153, 156, 157central planning 135–6and Cold War 137, 138and conflict 131, 132, 133–4, 139,

147, 149–50constitutional reform (1974) 136–7,

138–9control over money supply 138control of resources 153–4creation of new nation-states 140, 151cultural diversity 138–48, 157, 158desecration 156dictatorship 133disintegration 148–50, 151–2, 158,

199economic decline 13, 135–6, 137, 146and ethnicity 132, 142–3and European Union Accession 138federal solution 152and IMF austerity programme 137industrialisation 135, 145internal migrations 131, 135, 145

and international intervention 150–3media campaigns 154migrant workers from 135, 137and minorities 139and nationalism 132, 134, 136,

139–40, 143, 148, 151, 1571990 elections 148–9and Nonaligned Movement 135peoples (narod) 139, 141, 143, 145,

151, 154, 157, 163rape 155–6refugees 150regional autarky 136–7republics 138–40, 148–50, 151–2rural society 131–2, 134, 138, 146–7and self-defence 155and territory 139–40, 151–2under communism 134–8, 157, 158urban society 133, 137–8, 146, 147viability of 158violence 153–6

Zulaika, J. 118, 127, 130


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class nation and identity-the anthropology of political movements

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